


Breakwater

by dekubitus_rex



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, F/F, M/M, Multi, Murder, Nightmare Imagery, POV Alternating, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Serious Injuries, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Relationships, Will trying to come to terms with DarkWill, road tripping cannibals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-12 00:14:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28501311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dekubitus_rex/pseuds/dekubitus_rex
Summary: It was as if the two of them were suspended in a space void of time, as if they had never stopped floating in the cold ocean tide. They were bleeding out and they couldn’t breathe but it didn’t matter. They would keep floating until Will decided to either drown them or bring them up for air. There were promises Hannibal had made back in the real world, feasts to finish and reckonings to be had but they could wait. For now he was happy letting himself drift in the current of Will Graham’s mind.Will drags Hannibal out of the Atlantic and has to deal with the consequences of his becoming. They embark on a roadtrip of murder and introspection and Hannibal sits back patiently while he waits for Will to make the decision that will seal their fate. A story about blood and the ocean, and loving something that may ultimately destroy you.
Relationships: Alana Bloom/Margot Verger, Will Graham & Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 18
Kudos: 91





	1. Prologue - Day of Wrath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
> _Dies irae - Dies illa  
>  Solvet saeclum in favilla  
> Teste David cum Sybilla  
> Dies irae - Dies illa  
> Solvet saeclum in favilla_  
>   
>    
> _The day of wrath, that day  
>  Will break the world up into ash  
> As witnessed by David and the Sybil  
> The day of wrath, the day of wrath, that day  
> Will break the world up into ash_  
> 
> 
> \- Dies irae, medieval Latin poem, used throughout history as Memento mori, a symbol of death  
> 

Thunder exploded in the night sky the moment they broke through the rippled surface of the Atlantic. Will could see bright flashes of lightning behind his closed eyelids. He felt salty water hitting his face with numbing force and violently tearing at the cut in his right cheek. It was almost cold enough to stop his heart. He wasn’t sure whether he was alive or dead and he found himself not caring either way. That was, until he felt the body beneath him slowly slipping from his grasp, limp hands loosening the tight grip on his shirt and sinking, sinking, sinking. 

With some effort he opened his eyes. He was floating in a red cloud of rinsed out blood, suspended by the water. He could see his own blood, drifting from his shoulder like smoke, weightlessly dancing around his fingers on its way to the surface. There was more blood, trailing up from beneath him, an angry stream of black, pumping into the ocean at an alarming rate. It was all Will needed to wake from his dreamlike state.  
After three strong downwards strokes the faded silhouette beneath him started to take shape. He reached out, fingertips brushing against the soft wool of a cashmere sweater. He got hold of the collar and gripped it tight. Ineptly paddling with his legs and free arm, he returned them to the surface. 

Gasping for air was like popping a bubble in which time and pain and noise didn’t exist. Now he could feel all of it ripping through his body so violently, he was tempted to close his eyes and sink back down into the comfortable blackness once and for all. The storm was roaring above him, as if enraged by the sight of the two men returning from what should have been certain death. Will could hear the deafening sound of waves crashing into rock, swelling and fading, he could feel sea-spray splashing his face and blinding him, while tempestuous water toyed with his limbs. His cheek felt like someone had set fire to it, his chest stung like he was breathing shards of glass instead of air. He must have broken some rips in the fall. However, his shoulder was his biggest concern. Throbbing pain was spreading out from where the knife had torn through his pectoral muscle, rendering his right arm basically useless. 

His right arm, which was still clutching the lifeless body that he pulled from the depths of the Chesapeake Bay, fingers intertwined inextricably with the now worn-out collar of the gray cashmere sweater. 

Panic started to creep up his throat. His eyes searched the foot of the cliff they plunged down from what felt like centuries ago, looking for some kind of shore they could safely swim to without having their bodies smashed into sharp black boulders, hidden just beneath the increasingly raging waves. He could make out something that looked like a large flattened rock, roughly a quarter of a mile down the coastline. As the distorted reflection of lightning rippled across the ocean surface, Will felt the wind picking up speed and he made a decision. 

Slinging the other man's arm around his neck to free up both of his hands he started struggling towards the uncertain salvation promised by the smooth black stone, wincing every time the current pulled at his injured shoulder. Hannibal Lecter was taller and heavier than him and right now, he was deadweight. If Will wouldn’t have been busy trying to stay afloat, he might have been amused by the absurdity of the situation. Risking his live to save the man he tried to kill mere seconds ago. 

_Can’t live with him, can’t live without him._

Will felt like he’d been swimming for hours. The rock didn’t seem to come any closer. He started to wonder if the current was dragging them in the opposite direction. His lids hung heavy over his eyes, closing a little more every time he took a stroke. When his hand finally brushed against silky stone, his world had turned into a pulsating tunnel vision of velvet blood and purple lightning. Fighting the urge to just pass out then and there, he crawled back to the body that lay sprawled out where the sedimentary platform emerged from the restless water, pale skin unsettlingly bright against the black rock. 

The lower half of Hannibal's sweater was drenched in a mixture of washed out and fresh blood. Will found himself to be fascinated by the sight. Some part of him had always assumed that Hannibal Lecter didn’t bleed, that when you ripped him open nothing but darkness would stream out. Laying there like this, his body broken, his eyes saggy and his lips cracked he looked strangely...human. 

Will put his fingers, trembling in the grim Atlantic cold, to his jugular and felt for a pulse. Nothing. The only thing he felt was his own heartbeat, creeping up his throat and pounding against his eardrums. He struggled to his knees and started performing CPR. He felt the other man's rips crack beneath his intertwined palms as sharp pains shot up his right arm on every downwards push. The gunshot wound in Hannibal's abdomen oozed thick dark blood in a silent syncopated rhythm to Will's compressions. Finally, he started to stir. 

Heavy eyelids fluttered open and Will helped him turn sideways as he was coughing up cold and clear vomit over his hands and chest. Relieved, Will collapsed on his back and closed his eyes, running a heavy hand through the sweat already cooling on his forehead.  
When he opened them again, Hannibal had hoisted himself up onto his elbows, looking out over the windswept sea. 

“We’re alive.” 

His voice was hoarse and barely audible against the bellowing thunder and the towering waves fighting for power under the eroding cliff side. Will only managed a slight nod in response. 

As the effects of the adrenaline started to subside, he felt the repercussion of his injuries overcome him. Unfiltered pain breached through the soothing dam of shock and flooded his exposed mind. Thick and heavy raindrops were the last thing he felt before he passed out. Around them, the storm was starting to cease.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started out as a one-shot (doesn't it always?) but I started writing the next chapter (which I'll upload soon) and now I'm plotting an entire story, so I guess you can expect (semi-)regular updates from me! The next chapter is gonna be much longer and will contain some actual conflict and dialogue, so stay tuned for that. Also, sorry for the probably abhorrent grammar and spelling in this, english is my second language and I am yet to find a native speaker to proof read this for me. Also also, this is the first time I'm writing something with multiple chapters and probably the first time I'm writing anything in five years, so I'm simultaniously excited and shitting my pants about how this is gonna turn out. Anyway, thanks for reading :)


	2. Shark Teeth

The sun was rising into what promised to be an unusually warm April morning. Tim was strolling down the narrow beach that stretched out between the Calvert Cliffs and the Chesapeake Bay. Bailey, his brown and gray Springer Spaniel mix trotted ahead of him, stopping every few feet to investigate a stone or a piece of sea weed, half buried in the sand. 

Tim was eleven, soon to be twelve, which he never failed to mention, since he was short and petite for his age and people hardly ever guessed him to be older than ten. His eyes were fixed on the ground in front of him, trailing back and forth between overgrown rocks and bone-like driftwood. He was looking for shark teeth. 

Fossils were a common find along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Sleeping in the exposed rocks of the St. Mary’s Formation, closed of from the world since sixteen million years lay the remnants of beasts that ruled the Miocene seas. An attentive observer might spot a petrified vertebrate or the imprint of long decayed scales between the rugged boulders bedded in the cliff side. And with a bit of luck, one might even stumble across a jagged black shark tooth, big enough to cover both hands of an eleven, almost twelve year old boy.

Tim had collected some smaller teeth on his regular trips to the beach, some shaped like daggers, long, pointy and smooth, others more bulky, with saw-like edges curved backwards to keep struggling prey from escaping. It was the big ones he was after though. The idea of a sixty feet monster, powerful enough to snap a whale in half, mesmerized him. He liked to imagine how a tooth would wash upon the shore in front of him, returning from the ocean floor it sank to eons ago, after it was lost in some prehistoric battle between creatures of sheer inconceivable size. He imagined clutching it between his fingers, a piece of the deadly jigsaw puzzle that once formed a mouth big enough for Tim to step through. The thought made his lips curl into an excited smile.

He sat down cross legged, the beach still fairly moist from a cold night and a midnight storm and buried his toes in the sand. His right hand produced a small Swiss army knife from his pocket, courtesy of a father he otherwise only knew through Christmas cards and the occasional parcel containing conscience-clearing presents such as this. His thoughts only briefly entertained the familiar notion of the mental image he had created of his father over the years, tall and handsome with hair as flaming red as his own, while he used the knife’s blade to scrape some long empty seashells off a piece of flat rock. He didn’t particularly miss a father figure in his life. He just sometimes wondered if he would have liked sharks as well.

The sound of Baileys agitated barking pulled him from his day dreams. He stopped the scraping and lifted his head to look for the dog. Fifty yards ahead of him, the sandy beach strip ended and passed over into a field of half submerged boulders. Bailey was leaping over the shallow waves that rolled towards the shore, steering towards a large flat rock. 

On the rock, Tim could make out two vague figures, hardly distinguishable from the black stone surface. He squinted his eyes against the rising sun and drew his breath in sharply as the distinct silhouettes of two seemingly unconscious men started to take shape. Staggering, he started his descent down the beach. Unknowingly to him, Tim had just found a shark.

____________________ 

Will was dozing on the front porch of the wooden stilt house he shared with Molly and Walter. The wind carried the smell of pine needles and tree sap and the distant call of a shrike echoed somewhere between the treetops. A woodpecker was working the bark of the ancient white pine that towered above their driveway, his staccato rhythm vibrating through the forest. 

Will let out a long sigh and sunk deeper into the pillows draped across his makeshift napping spot. Soon Molly would return from her shift at the store. They would prepare dinner together and maybe play baseball with Wally in the yard afterwards. He smiled sleepily at the thought.

He heard claws clicking on hard floor and moments later a wet snout nuzzled his face. “Winston.” he said, one hand reaching up to scratch between furry ears. He opened his eyes to image of Wally standing above him.

Only it wasn’t Wally. The boy staring down at him with shock-widened eyes was half a head shorter than his stepson, had ginger hair and the most freckled face Will had ever seen. He was holding back a dog by its’ collar, which except for his shaggy brown fur bore hardly any resemblance to Winston.

It took Will a few seconds to remember. The cliff, the ocean, the storm. Hannibal. He looked over his shoulder to find the other man awake, looking up at their discoverer with blatant curiosity. He was pale from the blood loss he suffered and Will could tell by the way he was sitting slightly sloped to the left that he was trying to keep his weight off his injured side, but his face was void of any signs of pain. The quick picture of humanity Will had glanced at night was gone. Hannibal was back in his person suit. 

“What… what happened to you?” the boy gasped, eyeing their torn and blood-soaked clothes. Will opened his mouth to tell a yet to be made up lie, but nothing but a rasp escaped his arid throat. 

Hannibal answered in his stead. “We were attacked on the clifftop. Three man, they robbed us. One of them had a gun” He pointed to his abdomen. “We tried to get away, but it was quite dark and we couldn’t see where we were going, so we took a bit of a tumble down the cliff side. Luckily, Louis here is an excellent swimmer.” His right hand patted Will’s shoulder. 

The boys mouth had opened more and more with every word Hannibal was saying, his eyes alternating in amazement between the two men and the towering bluff they had plunged down from.

“What’s your name?” Hannibal asked, his voice warm and friendly.

“Tim. And this is Bailey.” A freckled hand came down to rest between the dogs ears.

“We are extremely fortunate that the two of you stumbled upon us. My name is Armand, and this is Louis. Do you live close by?” 

Tim gave a shy nod in response. “Just down the beach and up the hill. You can almost see it from here.” 

He lifted an arm to point south and Will squinted at what looked like a cross-hipped roof hidden between budding treetops. The cliffs eased into overgrown hills in this direction and Will wondered how far the current had carried them before he had swam them both back to shore. Looking back north, he couldn’t see any trace of Hannibal’s hide-out, the posh glass-front house planted so elegantly into the rugged landscape.

“My mom's a vet.” Tim continued, seemingly gaining confidence. “She can help you. You can use our phone if you like.”

Hannibal and Will exchanged a quick glance. “I’d hate to give you or your family any trouble, but I believe we are in no position to turn this offer down.” Hannibal gestured towards their injuries.

“Can you walk?”

“Let’s find out.”

Hannibal got to his feet with surprising ease. Will was feeling light-headed and he groaned at the ache in his stiffened muscles, but he found both of his legs to be intact and working well enough.

Crossing the boulder field that lay between them and the beach nevertheless turned out to be quite the challenge for both of them and when they reached its end, Hannibal was clutching his wound and Will was breathing heavily. 

“You continue to surprise me, Will.” Hannibal remarked as he bend down to gather a piece of driftwood and started breaking off rogue twigs to fashion it into a walking aid.

Will had finally regained his ability to form words. “Believe me, I continue to surprise myself.”

Hannibal chuckled. “Slaying just one dragon doesn’t seem to have satisfied you.”

Will looked up to where Tim and his dog were walking, far ahead enough to be out of hearing distance. “No. I tried to slay a second one“. _And failed_ , he thought, not knowing whether to attribute the rising feeling in his chest to bitterness or relief. The realization of last nights events hadn’t quite dawned on him yet. His head was cloudy from exertion and injury, numbing pain throbbing through him with every step he took, slowing his thoughts. 

“And a third. Don’t discount yourself. You were willing to end your life on that cliff.” _He is smiling_ , Will thought to himself as he watched Hannibal from the corner of his eyes, _I tried to kill us both and he is smiling._ He wished Hannibal’s apparent glee about his murder-suicide attempt would spark at least some anger in him, however he felt nothing but emptiness.

“My life ended when I went to see you in the BSHCI” Will mumbled, his voice barely more than a whisper. The lie was evident, he didn’t have to look up into Hannibal’s self-satisfied face to know that he wasn’t fooling him. He’d been walking around in an almost comatose state these past three years, padded in comfortable clouds of peaceful domesticity. Going to visit Hannibal in the hospital was his attempt of clawing himself back to consciousness, ripping out his nails and scraping his hands in the process.

“And yet you are standing here in front of me, breathing and talking.” Will almost expected Hannibal’s words to be mocking, but his voice was solemn and filled with somber pride. “One might argue that you have sold your soul to the devil.”

Will couldn’t help the sarcastic snort that escaped his mouth. “I might as well have.”

Tim’s mother, after the initial shock of being greeted with two men covered in dirt and blood on her doorstep, introduced herself as Ellie Crichton. She had the same freckled skin and unruly crimson curls as her son and smiled at them with peach-colored lips, pulled into slight asymmetry by a small scar in the right corner of her mouth. 

She led them into a spacious open-plan kitchen with gray floor tiles and a large kitchen island, not unlike the one in Hannibal’s Baltimore home. The boy and his dog slipped through a small screen door that opened opposite from the narrow hallway through which they had entered the room and disappeared into a well-kept yard that overlooked the beach. Will could hear laughing and barking as a neon green Frisbee shot past the windows repetitively. He closed is eyes at the sound, trying to keep the waves of stinging sensations at bay that threatened to roll over the blissful indifference he had fostered in his mind since they had woken up on the shore. 

A baseball game was showing on a muted flat screen mounted on one of the walls as Ellie sat Hannibal down on a two-seater leather sofa to tend to his gunshot wound. She was easy to talk to and Will found that he quite liked her, even when changing the topic while she kept offering to call the police or an ambulance for them got increasingly harder. 

He finally took her phone to the bathroom with him, under the pretense of calling a friend that would pick them up and drive them to the next police station. Turning the phone between his fingers, he sat pondering for some minutes. Seeing Ellie and her son interact had made his chest clench with guilt. 

How much time had past since Dolarhyde had ambushed their convoy, how much time since they disappeared off the radar? Eighteen hours? Twenty? Jack must have called Molly by now. What story did he tell her? That the Dragon abducted and killed them both? Or that Hannibal took him hostage? Jack had to know better than that. He was probably already at the crime scene at the cliff house, inspecting Dolarhyde’s body and all the evidence that painted a clear picture of their midnight tumble into the ocean. Will hoped that Jack would be looking over the bluff and at the black water dancing below and concluding that their survival was close to impossible.

And still, he pondered.

He knew calling Jack or Molly or the police for that matter was off the limits. He couldn’t go back, knowing what he was. He couldn’t sit next to his wife and watch baseball while sipping beer, he couldn’t walk the dogs with Wally or teach him how to fish, not after what he’d done tonight. They weren’t safe with him. Still he felt the need to explain himself somehow, to apologize and leave them with more than their unanswered questions.

But a phone call would bear the risk of betraying their location, in fact he was almost certain that Jack was expecting him to contact someone, probably monitoring the phone lines of every person that presumed themselves close to the Will Graham of the past. A phone call could put Hannibal back in prison. And as much as Will wished that that was what he wanted, a quick and clean exit, closing a barred door on what had happened last night, on what happened in the last four and a half years and never looking back, he knew there was no point in pretending.

When he returned from the bathroom, Ellie was cleaning a nasty looking laceration behind Hannibal’s hairline and Will wondered whether he had acquired it in the fight with the dragon or in the fall that had followed after. 

He didn’t remember it being there when they had clung to each other in the afterglow of the horrific delight they had just shared, panting and trembling, the lines between them blurred so indefinitely it was almost unbearable. But considering that they had both been covered in blood from head to toe and Will surely hadn’t been in the right mind to check for possible injuries, he might as well have missed it.

Hannibal shot him an inquiring glance over his caretaker’s shoulder and Will could see the faint hint of uncertainty flaming up in his otherwise inscrutable eyes. _He’s asking himself if I called someone._  
He had betrayed Hannibal’s trust before and knew that the shards of that particular teacup were still buried deep into his flesh. For a moment he debated shaking his head ever so slightly to let him know that his concerns were unwarranted but then he decided that he quite enjoyed the thought of Hannibal Lecter experiencing something that even remotely resembled anxiety and even more so that he was the cause of it, so he just gave him an impertinent half-smile and cocked an eyebrow in nonchalant amusement.

When the time came to suture his wounds, Ellie and Will sat down on two of the bar stools that stood lined up at the kitchen counter, across the room from where Hannibal was still sprawled out on the couch, watching them closely. 

She peeled a curved needle from its sterile plastic wrappings and pinched it between the serrated jaws of a needle holder. The scissor-like instrument gave a little clicking sound when she closed it between her thumb and index finger. With her left hand she took up a pair of tweezers and carefully lifted the sliced up tissue. Will closed his eyes and prepared himself mentally for the tugging sensation when her right hand brought up the needle to his cheek.  
.  
“You should have this looked over by an actual doctor as soon as you can. Aesthetic concerns are usually not a priority when I’m stitching up peoples pets, so I really can’t promise you a particularly pretty scar.” Her needle was just breaching the space between the two skin flaps and Will had to hold his breath for a few seconds to keep the amused cackle that was rising in his chest from twitching through his facial muscles. Wrapping the thread around the needle holder and pulling the lose end through the resulting loops, she tied the first knot.

“How many stitches do you think I’ll need?” Will asked in the ensuing break. He looked up briefly to the TV where the home team had just thrown a particularly terrible pitch. He could almost hear Wally’s disapproving comments.

“If you were a dog I’d give you four, maximum five for a cut this small. But since I’m dealing with a human face here and you’d probably like to look at yourself in a mirror again at some point, I’m guessing it’s gonna be closer to ten. Sorry about that.” Will, now again silenced as she pushed the needle through his wound a second time, lifted his uninjured shoulder in an appeasing gesture.

“Tim cut his arm up real bad a couple of years ago, when we were out camping. The next hospital wasn’t exactly around the corner and it didn’t look dangerous so I just handled it myself. Gave him seven stitches. That’s the only other practice I have with suturing up humans, I’m afraid.” She laughed, tied the second knot. “Although I believe that performing wound care on a screaming eight-year-old is excellent preparation for any emergency situation.”

Her eyes trailed off into the yard, where Tim and Bailey were still going at their seemingly never tiring game of fetch. “He still likes to show off that scar.”

Will caught on the slight hint of melancholy in her voice and the question left his lips before he could help himself. “Where is his father?”

Ellie went very still, and her smile vanished for the first time since they had stepped into her home. “He doesn’t have one. Or at least we like to believe it would be better that way.”

Will had to look away as the familiar feeling of awkward misalignment that came with most of his social interaction overtook him. Supposed empathy disorder or not, he’d always had a talent for saying the wrong things at the wrong time. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

“Don’t worry about it” She interrupted, voiced tinged in a little more sharpness than probably intended. When he managed to look at her again, she had forced the smile back onto her face. “Do you have children?”

Will was grateful for the sharp sting of needle reentering his skin. Any second he didn’t have to think about his possible answer to this question and the repercussions that would come with it was a second worth savoring. While he contemplated how to say ‘No’ in an at least halfway convincing tone, trying not to muse to much about who he would be betraying most with his denial, Walter, Abigail or Margot’s and his child that never was, his eyes aimlessly scanned the kitchen as if to look for an easy way out of this conversation until they came to rest on...his face. 

His own face, scaled up in an unflattering manner, staring back at him from the big flat screen on the wall that they were sitting in front of, Ellie with her back turned towards it. Unnoticed by him, the baseball game had cut to commercial, which was then interrupted by a news report. 

An agitated woman in an ill-fitting pantsuit was shown in the upper right corner of the screen, standing in front of the cliff house which was now overrun by FBI-Agents and policemen in dark blue uniforms, forensic scientist in white plastic overalls and journalists, the flashes of their cameras, armed with heavy telephoto lenses, reflecting in the yellow and black crime scene tape. She was mouthing soundless words into her microphone, still muted by the TV’s settings. 

Hannibal’s face was there too, an older picture from his trial three years ago, sitting behind the defendant’s table, clad in an orange jumpsuit that somehow still flattered him, his wrists in handcuffs. He was looking directly into the camera, eyes open and curious. _Almost anticipatory_ , Will thought as he felt a well-known chill creeping up his spine and tugging at his scars. 

Ellie must have seen something change in his face. She followed his eyes that were still staring over her shoulder and started to turn around slowly.

Hannibal moved incredibly fast. Will hardly had the time to register that he had gotten up from the couch before he was next to them, gripping Ellie’s hair with one hand and slamming her head into the tiled wall with what looked like an effortless and well-practiced motion. There was an obscene crunching sound and she instantly went limp, her unconscious body collapsing onto the floor. 

Will’s cheek started to burn like hell and he could taste copper as fresh blood filled his mouth. He looked down to find Ellie’s effete fingers still interlaced with the needle holder, the thread spilling out from the needle kept in place by the instrument’s locking mechanism. He could see bits of bloody skin dangling from the thread, distributed in almost perfectly equal intervals between the three knots she had managed to make before her fall had ripped his stitches open like the world’s most macabre zipper. Will was starting to feel sick.

Hannibal went to the kitchen counter, opening a few drawers before fishing out a large knife and returning to where Ellie laid sprawled out in front of him.

“What are you doing?” The question was rhetorical. 

Hannibal squatted down next to Ellie and once again grabbed a handful of fiery red curls, this time to lift up her head and expose her throat. Will could see the blooming red shape on her forehead where her skin had cracked and couldn’t help but admire how well the bright blood fitted with her almost pink skin and the glowing orange ember of her freckles. 

“I’m disposing of our tracks.” Hannibal let the blade hover just above Ellie’s jugular. “You might want to take a few steps back. Unless you perceive the amount of blood you were already covered in today as inadequate.”

“Stop it.” Will got up faster than he anticipated, his injured arm slammed into the counter and he had to grip onto his stool in order to regain his balance. “We’re not killing her.” 

_We._ He was way past the point where feeling like they were wielding the knife together when Hannibal was the one doing the killing was news to him, he had spent years disheveling at the intruding sensation, his nerve endings tingling in horror and delight every time it overtook him. Yet he didn’t anticipate saying it out loud.

Hannibal seemed to be startled by his choice of words as well, his knife hesitated in the air. “What do you propose we do instead? Tug her into bed and leave Jack Crawford’s phone number on the night stand? Supposing that you haven’t already made that call yourself.” His voice was indifferent, but Will could taste the hurt like poison seeping through the last sentence. _You can throw a man off a cliff in a futile attempt to rid the world of his evil, but god forbid you joke about putting him behind bars to atone for his crimes._

“I didn’t call anyone.”, Will hissed, knowing that he probably should have stopped to think for two seconds before teasing Hannibal when he had returned from the bathroom earlier, since the last time he had hurt his feelings had ended with a knife in his guts. Still he couldn’t find himself to care all that much, feeling a little uneasy was the least that Hannibal deserved, and if he was to sulkily disembowel Will in the aftermath, then so be it. 

“I was trying to maintain our cover story, so we didn’t have to do… this.” He was gesturing towards Hannibal’s hand still holding the knife dangerously close to Ellie’s skin. “She didn’t even see us on the television. We’ll grab a couple of supplies and disappear. It’ll probably take her some time to piece together what actually happened after she wakes up. We’ll be far away enough by then.”

Will had hoped that the suggestion of running away together would be enough for Hannibal to drop everything this instant, he was sure his eyes briefly lit up at the indication, but Hannibal remained the voice of reason. “As noble and altruistic as it is, I prospect this proposal of yours will allow us no more than two hours before Jack has an army of agents at our heels and a flock of helicopters swooping down on us. There won’t be anywhere to disappear to in time.” He talked as mundanely as if he were lecturing Will about how to properly water his plants, not trying to convince him of murder. “Let me finish here, and it will be days before anybody finds them.”

“Them? No. You’re not touching the kid. No way.”

“Will-” 

Hannibal was interrupted mid-sentence by the snapping sound of the screen door falling shut. Will turned around as fast as his injuries allowed him to. 

Tim was there, eyes widened to their full extent as he was staring at his mother’s lifeless body on the floor. He was holding a Swiss army pocket knife, clutching it so tightly his knuckles had gone white.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” They were more angry sobs than words. Tears were streaming down the boys face now, getting caught on his trembling lips.

Will took a careful step towards him and lifted his hands in what he hoped to be a conciliatory gesture. “No Tim, she-”

“Get away from me!” Tim shrieked, the hand holding the knife now stretched out in front of him. “If you touch me I’ll kill you!”

“Please, Tim, give me the knife. You’re mother is still breathing, I can help her, but you have to give me the knife.” he took another step.

He only realized his miscalculation when it was too late. The blade came down in a rush of flashing steel, slashing the tender skin between thumb and index finger of Will’s right hand, still held out towards the boy in a soothing attempt. Tim hesitated, staring in disbelief at the blood he had just drawn and Will used the momentary distraction to go for the knife.

He managed to encompass Tim’s wrist with his left hand and tried to twist it just enough so he would have to let go of his weapon, but the sudden jolt of pain had jerked the boy back from his state of startlement and he turned his hand away just in time, letting the blade’s cutting edge drive further into the rift between Will’s fingers. Will could feel it drawing vicious circles into his tissue as the two struggled against each other. The boy was stronger than he looked.

There was a popping sound and his nerves screamed as he finally managed to wrench his hand free. He tried to grab Tim again, this time maybe one his arm, further away from that cursed knife, when a wet and heavy sensation made him stop and stare at his newly acquired wound. His thumb dangled uselessly from his hand, connected solely to his palm by slices of skin and something Will guessed was either some very tattered nerves or the remainder of his thenar muscles. 

The joint had been dislocated and smashed by his attempt to wriggle away from the blade, the tendons lacerated and the flesh torn open in the process. For a ridiculous moment he tried to bend the thumb towards his palm, knowing full well that there was no way the grind up mash that used to be his finger would ever react to a nerve impulse again, and his stomach clenched when the joint capsule started bolting in and out of his tissue, as if it was trying to reconnect with its’ shattered counterpart.

He hardly had time to regard the remnants of his hand before the boy started charging at him again. This time, Will was quicker. His foot came up just below Tim’s knees, pushing against his shins and making him stumble. Will launched forward to catch him, but the slick blood covering the floor made him slip and trip against him, causing the boy to fall backwards instead.

He caught his own fall just in time to see Tim tumble against the kitchen island, his head colliding with the counter top in an ugly thumping noise. For the second time today Will watched someone’s body sagging limply to the floor. Blood grazed the sharp corner of the platform, blood and something else.

Carefully, he turned the boy on his back. Whatever he had braced himself for, it wasn’t enough, would have never been enough, to prepare him for the sight of a child’s lifeless eyes, frozen in an aimless stare, glancing up at nothing, accusionary shock branded into sky blue irises. Will didn’t need to check for his pulse in order to know that he was dead. He did it anyway. The narrow wrist kept slipping from his blood soaked and increasingly shaky fingers and Will could feel his movements become more erratic as panic washed over him in toppling waves.

He looked over at Hannibal with eyes that must have been oozing with unhinged helplessness, silently pleading for him to do something, to either knock him out or shake him awake from whatever nightmare he had fallen into, shake him back into the real world atop the bluff, where he could shamelessly indulge in his darkness and innocent children didn’t have to die because of him.

But Hannibal just sat there, still in the same position he had been in when Tim had entered through the back door, studying Will with his head slightly tilted to the side, his face all academic curiosity and menacing grace. Will found himself in piercing eyes that appeared almost black in the shadow underneath the prominent brow ridge and he felt searing hatred rising in his chest, hatred for the ocean and the storm, for not killing them effectively enough, hatred for himself and his selfish volition to stay alive. There was no hatred for the dark eyes however, no matter how deeply they dug into his mind, no matter how much pleasure they took from seeing him being torn apart and put together over and over again. And for that, Will hated himself the most.

Under Hannibal’s hands, Ellie was starting to wake up. Glazed over eyes strayed through the room unfocused, fists clenched and unclenched, brows furrowed and teeth worked against each other in a desperate need for regained orientation. Will could see her eyes clearing as her vision returned, could see her staring at him, bend over her dead son. 

As she opened her mouth for a silent scream, Hannibal tipped back her head and cut her throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to wikiHow for filling the (admittedly quite extensive) gaps in my wound-suturing knowledge. Sorry about your thumb, Will.
> 
> I have a tumblr, come and say hi if you want: [dekubitusrex](https://dekubitusrex.tumblr.com/)


	3. Do cannibals dream of empathic sheep?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"...ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated."_  
>  \- Philip K. Dick, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'  
> 

The road unraveled in front of them, dipping into a mist-filled valley hemmed by thorn-like trees. Flocks of birds rose from the forest as they drove by, their plumage black against the bone-colored sky. Hannibal cracked a window and let the cold salty air carried inland from the Atlantic graze their faces. He breathed in the ocean, absorbed the smells of ancient wood and wet asphalt and let them circle on his tongue, prickling like cool champagne. Somewhere north someone was starting a campfire, and Hannibal took in the aroma of smoldering twigs and roasting sausages suspended over coals with heartbeats of ember. And above all he could smell Will. The freshly clotted blood in his wounds, the dried brine in his hair. Beneath that the smell of skin roughened by years of manual labor, subtle, like the base note of his very own fragrance.

Will hadn’t spoken much since they had left the little beach-side house turned crime scene. There had been a khaki-lacquered Chevrolet in the garage and a matching key on the sideboard next to the front door. They had searched the rooms for supplies, gathering stocks of canned meals, blankets, medical equipment, cash and even a rusty looking gas cooker. 

Hannibal hadn’t bothered with cleaning up. Jack Crawford might have been oblivious from time to time, but he wasn’t stupid. Two bodies this close to where they had disappeared from the face of the earth would inevitably point in their direction, superficially wiping away at their fingerprints would have hardly made a difference. He had stopped to pry the knife from the boy’s dead fingers though, slipping it into his pocket where it lay heavy against his thigh, glued to the fabric of his pants by Will’s half-dried blood.

They had taken their time to tend to their wounds, Hannibal stitching up the mess that was Will’s face to the best of his abilities. His hand had hovered over the stab wound in Will’s shoulder, fingertips grazing the knotted mass that had become of the bullet wound Chiyoh had given him a lifetime ago. A sad smile had settled on his lips as he wondered about wrong turns and roads not taken. It didn’t matter anymore. They were here now. Time did reverse.

There had been no saving Will’s thumb, at least not under the circumstances they were in. Hannibal had put Will into the Chevrolet’s passenger seat and administered some propofol he found with the medical supplies before he severed the remaining nerves and muscles, thinking about how different it felt from all the other times he had cut into his flesh.

He had examined his own injuries in the bathroom mirror while he waited for Will to come out of his narcotic-induced daze. The bullet wound was less of a concern than he had feared – the projectile had eaten it’s way through only muscle tissue and fat, leaving his organs and major blood vessels unscathed. The blood loss and pain had made him tired and slowed his reflexes, but those were minor inconveniences compared to the possible sepsis and major surgery a nicked bowel would have brought with it.

His back had gotten the worst of it, deep cuts and lacerations hidden between bruising that was almost black. Now, in the car, he pressed into the backrest of his seat, savoring the sharp sting of the flesh wounds and the throbbing ache of the contusions and hematomas, while his mind raptured at the memory of holding Will close before crashing into water like concrete.

When Will finally broke the silence, his voice was as gentle as it was bitter. “Why is it that every encounter we have, I lose some part of myself in the process?” 

Hannibal regarded him from the corner of his eyes, saw him looking down at the gauze that covered the space where a healthy thumb had sat mere hours ago.

“I don’t consider it a loss as much as a gained opportunity. An act of alteration, a stepping stone in your becoming. Layers of outer flesh carved away to reveal what has been waiting beneath all along.”

“Fingers don’t grow back. Flesh that has been severed can’t be reattached. Once exposed, the core can never be covered up again. You cannot call back what you’ve unleashed.”

“Nor do I want to.”

They fell quiet again for some minutes. Condensed moisture started to tarnish the windows as the mist grew denser around them. Will rested his forehead against the cool glass and Hannibal kicked the windscreen wipers into motion. The forest sliding by behind their rhythmic swinging blurred into shades of brown and silver and for a brief moment Hannibal was sure to have seen velvet antlers move between the trees.

“I wish I could call it back. I wish I would want to call it back.” Will’s breath drew hazy clouds against the glass as he spoke.

Hannibal hadn’t been too vain to recognize the truth in Will’s words. He pitied him. Back on the bluff he had shown him what it meant to be free and Will had reveled at the understanding, fire burning in his eyes as the chrysalis ruptured, as he was reborn in blood. When he had taken him over the edge, Hannibal had understood. If Will, laden with something as ephemeral as morals and guilt, found himself unable to reconcile with his demons, then Hannibal would be content in their shared death. If that was their only chance of being together, behind the veil, he would embrace it.

“Do you regret -”

“No.” Will cut him off. “I’ve accepted what I am. I’m not regretting. I’m grieving the person who I thought I was. And I’m trying to figure out if I can live with the person that I am.”

“Trying to figure out if you can live with me?”

“So to speak.”

It wasn’t nothing. An ultimatum, a glint on the horizon in this limbo of self-hatred Will was navigating them through. Will had laid out their options and Hannibal was ready to sit back and watch him toss the coin. Acceptance or death. Burning together or bleeding together. In the end, Hannibal thought, it might not make that big of a difference. 

“Did you ever kill a child?” Will almost spat out the question.

“I did.” In a different life, Hannibal might have lied, a futile attempt at keeping Will’s good faith, but they both knew themselves to be beyond such banalities. He thought of Abigail, not quite a child anymore when she bled out in his arms, and of others, some more or less faceless, bricks in the walls of his memory palace, boxes locked away in the cobwebbed attic of his mind.

“How many?” Will was looking at him now. Hannibal was still focused on the road but he could feel his eyes piercing through his temples.

“Some.” The word hung heavy between them. Hannibal knew what would come next.

“Did you eat them?” The question was neither accusatory nor sympathetic. Will’s voice was clad in plain curiosity. 

Hannibal turned his head to meet Will’s gaze. Their eyes locked. “I ate my sister.” He blinked once, surprised by how little it took to give this last bit of him to Will as well, then he turned his attention back on the highway.

A green road sign emerged from the mist as the street forked in front of them. White letters indicated Charlottesville, forty-five miles north, and Lynchburg, thirty-seven miles south. Hannibal was just about to switch on the left indicator, turning them south, when Will abruptly leaned forward in his seat. He followed his eyes to a slumped dark figure underneath the signpost, barely hidden by the undergrowth sprouting on the roadside. 

It was a fawn, a white-tailed deer from the looks of it. Blood matted its’ reddish fur and Hannibal could see the flies covering its’ face, taking hold of empty eye sockets and sunken nostrils. Feces, released by muscles that had contracted and slackened as its’ last breath had left the animal’s lungs stuck to its’ hind legs. Its’ neck was broken, its’ head smashed in. 

“A hit-and-run” Hannibal commented.

“They should have buried it properly.” Will said, not taking his eyes of the carcass. 

“A dignified grave doesn’t compensate for an undignified death. Most rituals are performed purely for a clear conscience’s sake. The dead do not care about being honored.” 

“Is that what you tell yourself when you’re killing someone for their kidneys?”

“No.” Hannibal smiled, amused. “I tell myself to dabble more in Russian cuisine. Their kidney dishes are quite exquisite.”

With that, he restarted the engine and brought the car onto the left turnoff.

They dumped the Chevrolet a few miles north of Lynchburg, driving it far enough into the forest so it couldn’t be spotted from the road. Its’ dull green paint blended in nicely with the trees. Hannibal left the key in the ignition, hoping that some black market car dealer would find the vehicle before the FBI did. Protected by the impending dusk they walked into the next suburb, stopping to catch their breath every time the strain on their healing injuries became to much. 

As civilization grew closer, dim lights transformed into lamp post and display windows while the sound of rustling leaves got drowned out by traffic noise. They kept to the side of the road, their collars turned up and their faces hidden in shadows.

Stopping at a shabby looking convenience store, they prowled through the parking lot as they looked for a car that was old enough to hot-wire with the tools they had. Will spotted a dusty gray station wagon, a Volvo, and showed Hannibal how to pry open its’ control panels, revealing the wires underneath.

“The brown ones are the starter wires, those are the ones you want to be cutting.” He tried to do just that, using scissors from Ellie’s medicine kit, and huffed when the blades struggled against the copper.

Hannibal fished the Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. One of its’ features was a tiny saw which he enabled it with a press of his thumb before he handed it to Will. Will hesitated, staring down at his own blood that had dried into rusty brown shapes along the blade. He didn’t look at Hannibal when he took it from his hands.

“Curious things they teach you in law enforcement.” Hannibal propped his forearms onto the roof of the car and leaned forward to get a better view. Will struggled with the knife in his left hand, unsteadily mincing through the cords.

“You pick up some stuff as you go along.” The second wire came apart and Will connected the ends, careful not to touch the exposed copper. The engine came to live, an uncertain stutter at first before it steadied into a confident hum. 

“There.” Will’s face seemed to relax, he even smiled a little. “Better get in before somebody hears us.”

The twilight passed and darkness settled as they made their way further west. Will had switched on the radio and Hannibal suffered through endless queues of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers as the Blue Ridge Mountains rose around them. When their disappearance was mentioned on the news, he watched Will’s face closely. His eyes were fixed firmly on the road but something twitched in the corner of his mouth. Hannibal couldn’t tell whether he was smirking or clenching his jaw. There was no notion of the ginger woman and her son, so either they hadn’t been found yet or Jack had successfully managed to keep the press away. As the news anchor started to theorize about a potential kidnapping situation, both of them broke into laughter. Hannibal found it to be not entirely untrue, even if the details on who was kidnapping whom were more elusive than the anchor could have guessed. 

“Why did you pull me out of the ocean, Will?” The question slipped past his lips before he could help himself. He knew the answer, of course, at least some version of it, still he needed it to be said. “You could have left me to drown and be free of me once and for all.”

The answer was hardly more than a mumble. “What’s the point of existence if nobody is there to see you?”

Hannibal kept pressing. “So you keep me alive for purely selfish reasons?”

Will glared at him briefly. “Don’t you do the same with me?”

Chuckling, Hannibal concluded; “We are each other’s prisoners. The most excessive kind of love.”

Will’s laugh was sarcastic and dry. “This isn’t love. It’s ownership.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he continued, his voice thick with something Hannibal couldn’t name. “Codependency. One can not live on without the other. It’s a contract. Love is willing. It builds. This is destructive.”

Hannibal licked his lips, filled with the sudden desire to pull the steering wheel from Will’s grasp and bring the car crashing down the steep mountain slope. He chose his next words carefully. “It’s consumption. We nourish of each others presence while simultaneously reducing each other to dust.” He offered Will a conciliatory smile. “I might agree with you. Calling it love would be reductive.” Will only frowned and kept on driving.

At night they slept next to each other in the car, the back seat propped down to make room for both of them. The mist had cleared and Hannibal was watching the sky through his window screen, knowing that Will was doing the same. He found himself overcome by the desire to crawl into Will’s skull and soak up the constellations through his eyes, learning how he made sense of them, feeling the way Will felt when the earth turned under his feet while stars died and were reborn above his head.

Will’s breathing grew steadier as he fell asleep, then started to hitch as he stirred, caught in furtive dreams or nightmares. Hannibal studied the lines between his furrowed brows, traced them in his mind until he knew them by heart. It was as if the two of them were suspended in a space void of time, as if they had never stopped floating in the cold ocean tide. They were bleeding out and they couldn’t breathe but it didn’t matter. They would keep floating until Will decided to either drown them or bring them up for air. There were promises Hannibal had made back in the real world, feasts to finish and reckonings to be had but they could wait. For now he was happy letting himself drift in the current of Will Graham’s mind.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed and whether he had been lost in thoughts or dreams when purple morning light started to fill the car. It wasn’t the light that had startled him though – he had been woken up by fluorescent tubes ruthlessly filling his cell with sickly white lighting every day of his incarceration – it was the noise. A canon strung together by countless voices, each following their own melody, rhapsodies fighting one another in beauteous crescendos. Hannibal hadn’t heard birds sing in more than three years.

Carefully, as if afraid to startle them, he opened the door and swung his legs, still stiff from their less than comfortable bedding, out of the car. Out here, the distinct tunes grew clearer. He could make out a sparrow’s sharp whistle and the eager chirp of a warbler. Deeper, fuller sounds echoed from a tree nearby and when Hannibal lifted his gaze to its’ branches he could see the blood red plumage of a northern cardinal perched between them. Soft shadows tinged the tree’s bark and Hannibal watched them growing smaller before he turned his attention east where the sun was just breaching the horizon, obscured by hazy clouds in endless shades of pink. Virginia lay beneath him, an ocean of oaks and pines, asphalt bridges connecting suburban islands that rose and fell on waves of misty blue hills. 

Approaching sun-rays illuminated the winding road that they had followed up the ridge, climbing steadily between rugged granite and wild spring flowers. Hannibal turned west where the ridge sloped down into a narrow valley, stretching north and south as far as he could see. A river cut through it, still hidden from the sun by towering mountains, its’ surface opaque, like soft black velvet.

He thought of the last sunrise he had seen, sitting on the porch of Will’s house in Wolf Trap, Chiyoh beside him, snow flakes caught in her eyelashes. The freezing cold had clouded their breath and turned Hannibal’s fingers red and clammy as he scribbled his attempts at repentance into a leather-bound notebook. There had been no birds serenading the dawn, just the sound of Hannibal’s pen scraping over paper as he waited for Will to wake up. For him to make a decision. Some things never change.

But now Will was here, sat on one of the wooden benches lined up along the rest stop that they had chosen for their overnight stay, stirring through a can of white beans he was heating over the gas cooker. Hannibal felt the skin of his neck go warm with the touch of the morning sun as he walked towards him and thought that this was indefinitely better.

“You seem to be in a good mood.” Will noted as Hannibal approached.

Hannibal slid onto the bench opposite him and crossed his arms on the weathered table.”It is not everyday that one hastily escapes from prison in a helter-skelter type imbroglio only to wake up to nature performing on her most delightful instruments.”

Will snorted. “A choir to accompany the return of the Chesapeake Ripper, serenading his every step as he descends down his red carpet of blood and guts.” He spread his arms and lowered his head in a mocking bow.

Hannibal grinned to himself, he did like the sound of that.

“You wound me. Here I was expecting the sun had stopped to rise while I was put away.”

“Actually”, Will laughed, “The weather has never been better than in the past three years.” He leaned forward and offered the can with an apologetic smirk. “First meal in freedom. This particular performance of nature is known as white beans in tomato sauce.”

__________________

“When?” Alana felt as if all air had been knocked out of her lungs. She clutched the phone closer to her ear, partly because she worried about dropping it and partly because she had to be sure she wasn’t mishearing.

“They were found this morning. The coroner says it’s been at least twenty hours.” Jack Crawford’s voice was quavered with what Alana hoped was anger, not fear. She had never heard him this upset and it frightened her more than the actual words he was saying.

“Twenty hours!” she hissed, louder than anticipated. “He could be anywhere by now.”

Jack sighed, “I know.”

A muttered “Fuck” escaped her mouth as she pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger, trying to fight the oncoming migraine. “I should have never agreed to this.”

“It’s not like you had much of a choice. We took a calculated risk. It was the best option we had.” Alana wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. Jack had started pacing around, she could hear his shoes clack on hardwood flooring. 

“I should have stayed with the convoy”, he mumbled.

“If you had stayed with them you’d be dead now, Jack.” She exhaled. “We thought we had a hold on the devil so we opened the gates of hell. We underestimated him. We should have known better.”

The pacing stopped. “It’s not Hannibal we underestimated.”

Alana closed her eyes and thought of Will. Will, who had seen when she and Jack and everyone else had been blind and Will who had, once he realized that no one was coming to his aid, tried to free himself from Hannibal on his own. For the brief period of the last twenty-four hours she had believed that he had finally succeeded, even if he had paid the ultimate price in return. She had felt the appropriate amount of guilt and grief for him, even if it was overshadowed by the sheer relief at the thought of Hannibal’s corpse, drifting at the bottom of the ocean. It might have been different four years ago, before the fierce protectiveness she had felt towards Will had turned into something seeped with unfamiliar cold. Something that had screamed at her to run and not turn around, to not look at it too closely. Will Graham had no longer been an intriguing mind to dissect. He had grown into a misshapen cluster of unwieldy thorns, absorbing the very air around them, never hurting but always pulsating under a thin layer of satin. It had made her queasy and she had found herself turning away. There had been some satisfaction in slapping the label of tormented, self-sacrificial hero onto the memory of Will and stuffing it into a dusty shelf at the back of her mind, where he fitted much more comfortably than he ever had in any real world interaction. She wasn’t ready to relabel it again so soon.

“Is Will alive?”, she asked, not; _Do you think he had something to do with this?_ , knowing that she didn’t want to hear the answer and that she would find out anyway.

“If he didn’t bleed out on that kitchen floor, than yes, he is. His blood was everywhere. And his prints were all over the kid.” Another deep sigh. “They think he killed him. In fact they’re pretty sure. But listen, Alana, I’ve seen the pictures, the crime scene is a mess, there was a fight, there’s no way of knowing-”

“Jack. You don’t have to lie to me.” Her eyes remained pinched shut. There was a picture of her own son, rosy-cheeked and grinning with the shameless joy only a toddler could experience, set atop her desk. She couldn’t bring herself to look at it now. _If they come for me, Will might slit his throat while Hannibal snaps my neck._ The thought was all she needed to turn the remaining guilt she felt for Will into searing hatred. Another box she could put him into. Surprisingly, she found, this one fitted even more comfortably than the last.

“You and Margot and your son, you’re somewhere safe?”

“I hope so.” She turned away from her desk and opened her eyes to look out over the front lawn of their Rocky Mountains residence. A black Mercedes with tinted windows was parked in the driveway and two broad shouldered security guards in black jeans and button-downs leaned against it. Three more stood at the double-winged entrance, two on the porch in the back yard. There was one with her wife and one with her son at any point of the day, and she had her own, waiting on the other side of the door of her study. Three years ago, back at Muskrat Farm, it had taken Hannibal hardly longer than a few minutes to take out six of them, with nothing more than a hammer. She had seen their bodies afterwards, twisted flesh, no more human than the pig blood still drying on her hands. “Can’t tell you where, of course. We keep changing locations. I’d advise you to do the same, but I’m sure you have a dozen fires to put out in Quantico.”

“There’s no putting out those fires. I’ve been let go.” He cleared his throat. “Probably was about time.”

Alana couldn’t say she disagreed with that. Still she said “I’m sorry, Jack.” before ending the call on some polite banter.

After hanging up, she leaned back against her desk and let her eyes drift along the snow-capped mountain tops, starkly white against the indigo of the late afternoon sky, while she went over possible traces they might have left behind on the farm, anything pointing towards the estates that they owned, spread out over the country, each bought under a different alias.

The door handle screeched and the sound pulled her from her thoughts. Margot popped her head around the corner, hazelnut curls pulled back into a low ponytail as they usually were when she had been riding. When she saw the look on Alana’s face, her brows pulled into a frown and she crossed the room to sit next to her on the desk.

“Who was that on the phone?” she inquired, studying her wife with increasing concern.

“Jack.”, Alana stated flatly as she turned to look at her.

Margot’s eyes widened as understanding spread across her face. There was no need for elaboration. “He’s alive.” 

Alana didn’t answer, she only sighed and lifted her hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Margot’s ear, her thumb drawing soothing circles onto the soft skin of her temples.

Margot took her hand and intertwined their fingers. Looking down on them, she said “We’ll have to move again.”

They closed their eyes as they rested their foreheads against each other. Margot smelled like shampoo and horses and wet mountain air. Alana inhaled deeply before she pressed a kiss to the bridge of her nose. “Doomed to a life in hiding. This doesn’t feel like I chose to be brave.”

“Feels to me like you’re choosing to be smart.”, Margot replied softly. “This is Hannibal Lecter we’re talking about. There’s no use in playing hero here.”

“I hate that he has this much power over me still. He promised to take my life but he doesn’t actually need to kill me to do so. Nothing is going to be normal as long as he’s out there.” Alana’s voice started to tremble and she lowered her eyes as she felt them growing moist. “I’ll always feel his shadow on me.” A single tear made it’s way down her cheek until it got caught in the corner of her mouth. Margot gently wiped it away, her palm resting against her jawbone. Alana leaned into the touch. The lump in her throat, heavy and cumbersome, started to dissolve as desperation was swallowed by all-encompassing fury. “I don’t want to keep running. I don’t want to be blind anymore.” She rose from the desk as the strength returned to her voice. “I want to see him dead. I want to see him in pain. And I want him to look into my eyes and know that I’m the one who caused it.”

She turned to Margot, eyes burning and teeth bared, and for a moment it was as if she felt Hannibal’s hands on her body again, holding her down while poison seeped from his eyes and mouth, dripping into every pore of her skin, filling up her lungs and heart until every breath was mingled with tar and the blood in her veins was nothing but ash. _He made me like this_ , she thought. _He touched me and remade me like him._ Her fingers started to shake as anger blended into disgust.

When she looked up, she expected to see shock in Margot’s eyes, maybe even fear. But the expression on her wife’s face was nothing short of solemn agreement. Of course she understood. She must have felt quite similar about her brother once. She stepped towards Alana and encircled her waist with her arms. “I know.”, she whispered. “He took away your agency. He deserves to die.”

Her lips came to rest on Alana’s shoulder, warm even trough the fabric of her blouse. Alana glanced through the window again, watching as the sky grew darker in the approaching evening. “I’m not scared.”, she said. “Let him come.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, thanks for all the lovely comments on the last chapter, that was a tremendous motivation! Thanks for leaving Kudos as well, I love you all <3
> 
> Apologies for the shameless Philip K. Dick reference in the chapter title, i couldn't help myself :D  
> This chapter turned out a little more freeform, a little less plot-ish and i actually quite enjoyed exploring the characters like that. Sometimes all you need is a roadtrip with your cannibal boyfriend to talk about your feelings. And I absolutely LOVED writing from Hannibal's perpective, he has such an attitude :D
> 
> I hope the next chapter is gonna take me less than three weeks, I can't promise anything but I'll do my best. In the meantime, come check out my tumblr or say hi if you want to: [dekubitusrex](https://dekubitusrex.tumblr.com/)


	4. Enucleation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the rating to Mature, since this chapter turned out a little more gory than anticipated. So,TW for blood and violence. And I hope you enjoy reading about gore as much as I enjoy writing it!

_It was dark in Will Graham’s nightmares. It was also quiet, except for the steady sound of breaking waves. Will could taste copper and salt on his tongue as he hovered through various shades of black. He knew somewhere above him was the bluff, all-encompassing, towering, like the end of the world. He also knew that the ocean was below him, rolling, waiting, opening its’ maw to swallow him whole. His arms reached out longingly, fingertips eager to breach the cold surface, to be embraced and absorbed, but he only grasped at thin air. The ocean wasn’t coming any closer, no matter how hard he kicked his legs, trying to maneuver himself downwards. He was trapped._

_His hand started to take shape in front of him, lines slowly manifesting in the darkness until he could see the complexion of his skin, puffed and yellow, the hand of a corpse. There was no thumb, just a gaping black hole puffing crimson clouds with every heartbeat. A single nerve chord hung from the hole, squirming and twitching like a dying snake. Will grabbed it with his other hand and pulled. He expected pain, but he felt hardly more than slight discomfort. His hand swelled and stretched comically as he pulled something entirely too large out of it. There was a wet popping sound and a fawn emerged, fur covered in slick black blood, the nerve connected to its’ belly like an umbilical chord._

_It got up and shook itself, sending thick blood clots everywhere. When Will reached out to touch, it looked at him with eyes like glass spheres and sprinted off into the night, its’ hooves supported by nothing but blackness._

_He tried to follow but found himself still restrained by the invisible forces that kept him suspended between the waves and the cliff. The fawn galloped in circles, seemingly unaffected by gravity. Its’ ears and tails perked up joyfully._

_Suddenly a hand seized the nerve chord and the fawn was yanked backwards. It squealed, high-pitched and panicked, as its’ captor reared it closer. Thin fingers encompassed its’ throat, fingernails dug into flesh as it was pinned down by wiry arms, too long and twisted for the meager body they were attached too. Shaggy dark hair covered the figure’s face but when it lifted its’ head, Will’s own features stared back at him, distorted by a teeth-baring grin, skin shrunk too tightly around the prominent skull bones, and eyes that were inky black instead of ice blue. A tongue flicked back and forth between lips pulled back far enough to reveal yellowed gums._

_The figure lifted a bone-like hand to the fawn’s throat, never taking its’ eyes of Will. Will could see the flash of a blade and he screamed, struggling against his restraints, trying to get between his mirror image and the delicate animal it was holding. He felt himself starting to sink, cold water splashed against his toes as he was pulled lower. The ocean was finally taking him in, but he didn’t want to anymore, he needed to go back up and do something. His arms paddled desperately but the current was now twining around his calves, grabbing him and tugging him closer. The last thing he saw before he was dragged under water was the red smile that the knife painted across the fawn’s throat. He opened his mouth to scream and chocked when he felt the ocean fill up his lungs. As he sunk lower, the world around him returned to darkness._

Will jolted awake coughing violently, hands clasping tangled blankets as he fought against the water he still felt in his throat, blocking his airways. His fingers clawed at his neck as if ripping out his trachea would free them up. He gasped helplessly for a few seconds before air returned to his lungs, so sharp and cold he could almost feel it cutting through his body. He sat up, let his head collapse onto his arms and waited for his jagged breathing to slow. When he looked up again, he found himself face to face with Hannibal, who was leaning against the backside of the driver’s seat, wrapped in another set of blankets. The unusually warm spring had started to cool down again as they approached Iowa, and Will could see little clouds of breath forming around Hannibal’s mouth. Stubble covered his cheeks, dark gray streaked with bits of silver, and Will didn’t know if it was that or the ragged clothes or the clumsy prison haircut that made the other man look less like the world’s most sophisticated serial killer and more like a feral beast in utterly unconvincing human disguise.

A book rested on Hannibal’s knees, his index finger pinched between the pages. He was watching Will closely. “Bad dreams?”, he inquired.

“Yeah.” Will huffed and pressed the heels of his hands against his burning eyes.

“Of what kind?”

Will thought that he almost sounded demanding. _We are bound now, your dreams belong to me._ It was the truth of course and Will found himself strangely unbothered by it.

“Drowning.”

Something moved in Hannibal’s face, almost too quick to catch. “At the bluff?”

Will nodded.

“You still wish for us to have died.” Hannibal stated it as a fact. If it hurt him in any way, he didn’t let on.

“There’s many things I wish for.” He pulled his knees to his chest. His body was still trembling, now more from the cold than the lingering nightmare. “A warm place, an actual bed, a shower. I haven’t properly washed myself in over a week.”

Hannibal scrunched up his nose. “I’m acutely aware.”

“We should find a motel.”, Will suggested, ignoring the jab. “Our stitches need to come out anyway, and there’s no way I’m doing that in the middle of nowhere.”

Hannibal didn’t hesitate at that cue. His right hand took hold of Will’s chin and he tilted his head slightly to get a better look at his scarring cheek. “You’re not quite there yet, I’m afraid.”, he told him while inspecting the tender pink tissue. "Perhaps a couple more days. Nevertheless I have to admit that the prospect of a good night’s rest and a change of clothes does sound quite appealing.” His thumb tapped against the fleshy skin next to the half healed cut. His hand was warm, a pleasant contrast to the clammy air inside the car and Will wanted to lean into the touch. Before he could, Hannibal pulled away. He smirked. “I believe we’re far enough from the east coast to try our luck, don’t you?”

As they followed the Illinois River north, the landscape eased into hilly terrain. Gentle valleys widened into meadows, and forests gave way to fields rich with crops and cattle. Three days earlier, at the western Kentucky border, they had abandoned their previous course west in favor of what they hoped would be a less easy track for the FBI to follow. They had turned north, loosely trailing after the Mississippi, taking as many unnecessary turns and unmapped dirt roads as possible. They slept in forests and highway rest stops, keeping away from civilization as much as they could. Sometimes they didn’t see another person or even a proper building for days. On a Sunday night, they dared to venture into a small town, picking locks and stealing clothes from a local boutique before they disappeared again into the Midwestern wilderness. Neither of them had an actual destination in mind. They had silently agreed to remain in the bubble Will had spun around them until he was ready to pop it. Reality encompassed them, distant behind marbled walls of soap, distorted by the spectral colors the light refracted onto the curved surface. Their future lay somewhere beyond those walls but inside, time had come to a screeching halt, waiting for Will to decide whether he was going to live or die with Hannibal. There was no rush to make plans for what came after. They enjoyed the calm of each other’s company, mornings tinged in golden sunlight and evenings spend in quiet camaraderie while unnameable things filled the spaces between them. But mostly, they waited.

“It’s funny.”, Will remarked one day while they were parked at a petrol station somewhere north of Springfield, waiting for their tank to fill up.”You worked so hard to alienate me from everyone and everything in my life. You didn’t have to put up all this effort. I’m alienated by nature.”

Hannibal looked up from the wrinkled map he had been studying, brows furrowed. “Not from me.” His eyes were scrutinizing and any other person might have flinched under his pinning gaze, but Will was overcome by a bizarre sense of peace. “I fear my explanations and apologies to be in vain, but I feel obliged to mention that it was never my goal to alienate you. On the contrary. I merely aspired to lead you away from meaningless connection so that you may embrace yourself and therefore others of a similar mindset.”

“Others being you.”, Will interrupted, receiving a sly smile in response.

“I’d argue that you were much more alienated before we met.”, Hannibal continued, undeterred. “And so was I.”

The motel they ended up choosing was just off the state route 29, wedged in between the Senachwine Lake and the Goose Lake. It was an old-fashioned, almost shack-like building surrounded by vast farmland and trafficked by hardly more then the occasional trucker. They pulled up in their red Ford Scorpio, the fifth car they had stolen since the Chesapeake Bay.

A small bridge separated the motel reception from the parking lot. A creek flowed beneath it, almost wide and deep enough to qualify as a small river. Will could hear its’ jubilant splashing as the wind toyed with its’ surface. The sound was bright and innocent and he found himself yearning for the violent thunder of crashing ocean waves. 

They decided that Will would be the one to get the rooms, his face being the least noticeable one, in spite of the large gash it sported. Hannibal’s trial three years ago had be quite a public one, with his face plastered all over the news for several months, and Will really didn’t want to risk another situation like the one in the beach house, in case they bumped into someone a little too interested in True Crime. He crossed the bridge and followed the weathered sign proclaiming “Check-in” to a wooden annex and opened a door flaking red paint like a second skin.

The reception was messy and small, but Will found it looked quite cozy as well. The desk took up half the room, bending under muddled piles of documents and a computer that was bulky and loud enough to be at least from the former decade. A stuffed badger throned atop a dusty shelf crammed with outdated road maps and tourist guides, its’ dull glass eyes scanning the room. There was a particularly ugly armchair squeezed underneath the shelf, covered in cushions that might have been green at some point. _Hannibal will hate it here_ , Will thought to himself and smiled.

A young woman with bleached hair and chipped nail polish sat behind the desk, flipping through a magazine with one hand and twisting her ponytail around her finger with the other. Will jammed his thumbless hand deep into the pocket of his stolen jacket, hiding at least one of the many reasons to stare. The woman asked him for his ID but accepted his lie about a stolen wallet without question, seeming more than glad to keep their interaction to a minimum. Will couldn’t blame her, the mere thought of forced socialization and mundane banter with strangers exhausted him and he couldn’t help but sympathize. He paid cash, handing over money that once belonged to a very much alive woman and a very much alive young boy and received two towels and a numbered key in return. 

There was a second car in the parking lot when he walked back, a blue pick-up that looked even more beaten down than the Ford he and Hannibal had arrived in. Its’ hood was propped open and a flannel-clad man slouched over the interior. In a different life, Will would have offered to help, but one person had already seen his face today and he didn’t want to push his luck. Also, the man looked perfectly capable. Still he strolled a few feet closer, curiously peeking at what exactly it was the man was fixing.

As Will passed, then man rose and his head appeared above the hood, a tanned bald scalp framed by untrimmed gray patches, an impressively large mustache dominating an otherwise gaunt face. “Son!”, he called out. “I could use a hand over here.”

Will hesitated, uncertain. He wasn’t used to people talking this bluntly to him and couldn’t quite decide whether he was charmed or offended. The benevolent smile the man gave him sealed the deal and he walked over to the pick-up.

He recognized the problem after a short look inside but the man dismissed him before he could open his mouth. “I know how to change the spark plugs, son, I’ll just need you to get my tool box from the trunk.” He rubbed his back and laughed. “My doctor says I’m not supposed to lift anything that heavy. And my wife agrees, so I guess I’ll have to listen to him.”

Will smiled, aware that he hadn’t said one word during the entire encounter and happy that it seemingly wasn’t expected of him. He strolled around the pick-up and leaned over the side panel to find a large gray box sitting in the center of the trunk. It really was quite heavy, he realized when he pulled it closer. His right shoulder screamed in protest when he started lifting it, so he brought his left arm underneath for support and gripped the handle with his right hand. Or at least he tried to. 

He remembered a second too late that this hand was now lacking the essential tool for gripping and before he could do something about it, the box slipped from his grasp and tipped over the panel. Its’ plastic casing shattered on the concrete floor, scattering drill bits, hex-wrenches, screws and nuts around Will’s ankles and under the car.

The man came running around the hood and Will could see in his face that he was ready to scream. He hunched his shoulders in anticipation.

“What in god's name- oh” He stopped and his eyes widened as he stared at the swollen stump that used to be Will’s thumb. His bald head flushed as he seemed to ponder whether it was acceptable keep shouting at him.

“I’m sorry.”, Will murmured, wishing the man would continue to scream if it meant that he would stop staring. He bend down to gather the littered pieces together.

“It’s okay.” The man hushed him away without looking at his face. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Everything alright here?” Hannibal appeared suddenly behind them, his voice a low purr.

When the man looked up at him, the flush, now a deep shade of scarlet, had spread to his face and neck. Hannibal gave him his most disarming smile, all cheekbones and charmingly cocked head, but everything Will could see were sharp teeth and lurking eyes and some part of him wanted to yell at the man and tell him to run. Instead, he imagined what it would be like to smash his head into the pick-up’s passenger door, grabbing his hair and hauling his face against the cold metal, again and again, until his mustache would disappear into an unintelligible mush of skin and blood.

“Ye-Yes.”, the man stuttered, faltering under Hannibal’s gaze.

“Wonderful.”, Hannibal beamed. He took Will by the elbow and gently but firmly led him away.

Their room was completely devoid of the rusty charm that had inhabited the reception. The floor was covered in cheap linoleum mimicking beige kitchen tiles. Whoever had installed it had done a less than average job; it bulged down under Will’s feet with every step he took. Time and nicotine had yellowed the lace curtains and floral print wallpaper, the small table underneath the window was covered in circular coffee stains and flanked by mismatched plastic chairs. There was one single bed, complete with moth-eaten and discolored bed sheets, and a futon, which was barely more than a mattress on the floor. Will could almost see the springs pressing through the fabric. Still, no other bed had ever looked this tempting to him. 

He sat down on the futon and stretched out, accompanied by loud squeaking sounds. Compared to the car’s uneven flooring, this felt like sinking into a cloud. His head grew heavy as the last week’s exhaustion flushed over him, weighing down his bones and reducing his muscles to a hot syrupy mass that oozed through the cracks of the mattress until the bed had absorbed him whole.

Through half-closed eyelids he watched Hannibal, who was inspecting the sheets on the single bed with a pouty expression.

“You want to go back to sleeping in the car?”

Hannibal frowned at him. “I prefer sleeping in my own dirt to sleeping in somebody else’s.”

Will waved a lazy hand towards the door. “Be my guest.”

Hannibal only cocked an eyebrow and reluctantly lowered himself onto the mattress. Will opened his mouth to add something impertinent, but the words drifted away from him as he slowly fell asleep.

When the steady drumming of the shower woke him up again, the sky outside the window had gone dark. As he opened his eyes, he realized that he had fallen asleep fully clothed, on top of the covers. Even his shoes had remained on his feet. Sighing, he sat up and kicked them of. He yearned for the shower. Never in his life had he felt this unclean. He currently owned two changes of clothes, both of them stiff with dirt, the one that he was wearing clinging to him with the fresh sweat of his nap.

He was pealing himself out of his jacket when Hannibal, clad in a towel, emerged from the bathroom, steam trailing behind him. His hair was slicked back, its’ wet strands dripping water onto his back, small rivulets collecting between his shoulder blades and trickling down around the Verger-branding just off the center of his spine. Will wondered if the asymmetry ever bothered Hannibal. He fought the urge to reach out and touch it. It had scarred badly, its’ outlines were bulging and dark, easily visible even between all the fresh cuts and bruises that Hannibal had acquired in the fall. Prison probably wasn’t the best place for scar-aftercare. 

Hannibal started rummaging through the little pile of belongings they had gathered in last few days, pulling Will from his thoughts. He fished out two shirts that looked just as filthy as the one Will was wearing and regarded them with the same look of contempt that he had given the bed sheets earlier. 

“I thought you liked your own dirt.”, Will grunted, before trotting into the bathroom, closing the door between himself and Hannibal’s wardrobe dilemma. 

The shower felt even better than the futon had. Will turned the temperature to the maximum and watched as his skin flushed under the relentless stream. He found a half empty bottle of cheap motel shampoo and worked it into his greasy curls, relishing the sensation of his fingertips circling against his scalp. After he had rinsed off, he looked at himself in the mirror, tracing all the new cuts and scars he had added to his collection. His shoulder and cheek were healing nicely, the scar tissue had stayed even and would be hardly visible in a year or two. He didn’t look at his thumb. He saw it every day, every time he picked something up or tied his shoes or hot-wired the car. A throbbing mass, swollen abstrusely large, aching in places where there was nothing left to ache, itching where he couldn’t scratch. Will thought of the old man in the parking lot and the shattered tool box on the ground. His stomach clenched in embarrassment and anger and he turned away from the mirror to pick up his clothes, using his left hand. 

He put on the same clothes he had been wearing before the shower for lack of a better option and grimaced at the smell of his shirt as he pulled it over his head. He made a mental note to wash their clothes in the sink before they went to bed and felt a little less inclined to make fun of Hannibal as he stepped out of the bathroom, shifting under the sticky fabric. 

Hannibal was sat in one of the atrocious plastic chairs and seemed to be in very high spirits.

“What are you smiling about?”

“I have a surprise. A celebration of sorts.”

“What are we celebrating?”

He gestured towards the room. “The roof above our heads. However meager and scabrous it might be.”

Will took a doubtful step towards the table. A small package sat on it, along with the Swiss Army knife, now wiped clean. Hannibal offered him the second chair, grinning like a child on Christmas morning. “Please, help yourself.”

Will took a seat and peaked beneath the layers of cloth in front of him. Two thin stripes of dried meat lay inside, hardly enough to count as a snack. He arched an eyebrow at Hannibal, who only waved his hand, ushering him on. The smell was faintly sweet and Will’s mouth watered. He took up one of the pieces as well as the pocket knife. The stripe was small enough to be eaten in one bite but something told him that this needed to be savored. Using the knife, he cut a slice for himself and one for Hannibal, reaching across the table to drop it into his opened palm. When his lips closed around the meat, he had to hold back a pleasured sigh. It was tough, yet rich and full, sweet and savory, delicate and intense at the same time. He knew _what_ it was. Had known from the moment he had seen the package on the table. It was the _who_ that bothered him.

“Please don’t tell me that this is the kid I killed.”, Will said, the tone of his voice only half joking.

Hannibal hadn’t taken his eyes of him, his piece of meat still untouched in his palm. His smile widened as he shook his head and dropped his gaze to where Will’s right hand rested on the table.

Will stared at him. The half chewed bits of jerky had suddenly grown heavy and thick in his throat. “When? How?” He hardly managed more than a hoarse whisper, his mouth now completely devoid of saliva.

“I dried it after the amputation while you were recovering from the anesthesia. I saved it for a special occasion.” Hannibal looked incredibly pleased with himself. Will had to grip onto the table. The memory of a tube being pushed down his throat hit him vividly and without warning. He could feel cold hard plastic pressing against his esophagus and he started coughing, struggling for air as his vision blurred around him.

Hannibal’s next words came to him from somewhere beyond the haze and Will wasn’t sure if he felt fingers intertwine with his own or if he was just clenching the tablecloth with his fist. “I remembered what you told me about losing parts of yourself because of me. I transformed those parts and now I am giving them back, improved. You’re not being disassembled, you’re being rebuilt. I am reshaping you.”

Will jumped backwards, his chair fell to the floor, clattering loudly. He swayed from side to side, unsure if he could stay on his feet. His head burned and he blinked frantically, trying to regain control of his vision. He opened his eyes to Hannibal’s face, blurry, lips pursed as he considered Will with an unusually open expression, adoration seeping through the amber of his eyes like specks of gold floating in honey, ferocious pride blooming on his cheeks. Will turned and rushed towards the door. He didn’t bother slamming it shut as he stormed into the night. 

There was no notion of where he was going, just onwards, and away. Bits of buildings and nature rushed past him, unrecognized. His bare feet caught on a large vine and he stumbled to his knees, breaking skin. The blood running down his shins felt hot enough to burn. He got up again, more crawling than walking until the terrain dipped into a grassy slope. Soft weeds flattened under his soles as he picked up speed, only stopping when he felt the sudden sting of ice cold water at his ankles.

He was standing knee-deep in the small stream, only now it wasn’t that small anymore. Buckets of rain had started to fall and the water in the creek had risen, churning and muddy, its’ current rustling angrily and pulling at Will’s feet. He hadn’t noticed the rain or the cold while he was running and now he lifted his face to the clouds, grateful for the thick drops on his burning forehead. The sharp pain in his temples subsided to a faint throb and his breathing slowed.

The little bridge loomed over him. Will retreated into its’ shadow to inspect his drenched shirt and torn jeans when he heard steps echoing on the wooden flooring above. _Hannibal_ , he thought as newly found fury rose in his chest. Suddenly, he became very aware of the pocket knife he was still clutching in his hand.

He climbed up the slope and stepped onto the bridge. The figure in front of him had its’ hood pulled up against the rain and was struggling to light a cigarette behind a cupped hand. It wasn’t Hannibal. As the man turned, Will recognized his mustache and weathered skin. He looked at Will with the same mixture of disdain and unease, shock mingling into the expression as his eyes lingered on his bloodied knees and the knife in his hand.

Will moved without thinking. Time seemed to slow around him as he crossed the three yards that separated him from the other man. The blade came down, plunging into the man’s eye, and Will felt like he was still standing in the stream, watching someone else wielding the knife. There was no scream, just a mouth pulled into silent and surprised _Oh_. Will yanked his hand back and the eye was pulled from its’ socket with a wet _plop_.

The man was staring at him, the remaining eye widened in disbelief, his jaw working as if he was searching for the right words to say. Will gripped his head, struggling to find leverage in the sparse patches of hair, and knocked his face against the guardrail, pulled him up and knocked him down again and again until his muffled screams turned into gargling and then into a moist crunch, like snow under heavy boots. He pushed him down a few more times before his tired muscles got the better of him and he let the limp body slide to the ground.

It fell on its’ back, exposing the red pulp that used to be a face. Will was reminded of soup, thick pumpkin mash, with bits of teeth and bone floating at the surface. The guardrail was coated in blood and brain matter. He wiped it off with his shirt. Sighing, he started to collect stones from the riverbank and filled the man’s pockets with them. When the body was sufficiently weighed down, he tipped him over the rail. It hit the water with a satisfying splash, audible even over the pounding rain. Will thought of the tool box tilting in his hands and smashing on the ground. He smiled as he watched him sink. He felt strangely calm.

The water couldn’t be more than eight feet deep, the body wouldn’t stay hidden for long. A couple of days was enough for Will though, he didn’t expect to still be alive by the end of the week.

When he returned to the motel, the lights in their room were still on. He opened the door to find Hannibal still sat at the table, absently staring out of the window until he heard Will behind him. He got out of his chair to greet him and then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the blood covering Will’s clothes and the half squished eye he was holding. Will smiled and lifted his hand, offering the eye to him. Hannibal opened his mouth and closed it again, and Will cherished the sight of his momentary confusion. Hannibal Lecter, speechless. He could get used to this.

Before Hannibal could recover from his current state of bewilderment, Will lunged towards him, dropping the eye and tipping over the table in the process. The window creaked as Hannibal was pushed against it, the Swiss Army knife at his throat.

“If we are going to do this”, Will breathed, “we’re doing it as equals.” He fastened his grip on the knife, pressing it harder against Hannibal’s skin, until the first drops of blood started to appear. “Stop playing games with me. I have become. I am what you have always wanted me to be. You cannot manipulate me anymore.”

Hannibal’s exhale was warm on the back of Will’s hand. ”I merely want what is best for you.”

Will pressed him harder against the window, his elbow digging into his shoulder. “You enjoy seeing me suffer.”, he hissed.

“I enjoy seeing you complete.”

“I am complete. We emerged from the ocean as one.” He leaned in close, his lips mere inches from Hannibal’s ear. “If you ever try to rearrange me again, I’ll cut your throat in your sleep, and then mine.”

He was about to step back when Hannibal’s hand encircled his wrist, holding him in place. He pried his fingers apart, taking the knife from him. Will let him. Hannibal stretched out his left arm and pinched the fat just below his elbow before sinking the blade into it. Will watched in disbelief as the knife cut through skin and muscle tissue, gushing up pools of blood in the process. When the wound was about an inch deep, Hannibal twisted the knife and started cutting forward towards his hand, peeling off a thick layer of tissue as he went along. If he was in any pain, his face didn’t betray him. His brows were furrowed and his eyes focused and Will imagined that he must have looked quite similar performing emergency surgery. 

A sickening amount of blood was running down Hannibal’s arm now, drenching both of their shirts and dripping onto the floor, where it had started to form puddles. Its’ sticky copper smell filled Will’s mouth. Hannibal severed the last bit of skin that still connected the tissue flap to his arm and lifted his acquisition to his face. The piece of flesh was a hand’s breadth long and as thick as a small steak. He studied it thoughtfully for one moment, then he stuffed it into his mouth and swallowed it down in one big gulp. 

Will only stared. He stared at Hannibal’s eyes, lingering on his own, unmoved and solemn. He stared at his Adam's apple, jumping up and down as his throat worked idly at the piece of meat. He stared at his arm, slick with blood, its’ skin in tatters. If he would have cut any deeper, he would have hit bone.

Hannibal smiled, his lips and teeth bloodstained. “Are we equal now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enucleation is a type of surgery in which part or the entirety of the eye is removed. Super cool to read about, but don't look at the google image search if you're easily grossed out. Or do look at it, if you're into that kind of stuff :D
> 
> Anyway, thanks so much for sticking with the story so far! Kudos and comments are always appreciated. Let me know what you think!
> 
> My tumblr is [dekubitusrex](https://dekubitusrex.tumblr.com/), feel free to say hi :)


	5. To See or Not to See

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”_  
>  \- J. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’  
> 

Will stood frozen in place. Somewhere, beyond the realm of his conscious actions, his hand had started to press down onto Hannibal’s arm, trying to stop the bleeding. He felt his stump dig into ragged flesh as blood filled the spaces between his fingers. There was so much of it. Enough that Hannibal should have been on the verge of passing out. Yet, he remained perfectly composed, only the faint paleness around his eyes and how he leaned a little heavier against Will than before indicating what he had just done to himself.

The hand of his uninjured arm held on to the sleeve of Will’s shirt, caressing the skin underneath in steady, drawn-out circles. The touch was all it took to transport Will back to the cliff. Their soaked clothes, their own blood mixed with someone else’s, their knees weak from the shared high, it all felt the same. He could almost smell the salt of the ocean, hear the waves breaking against the solid rock of the bluff.

“What do you want?”, Will croaked, feeling lightheaded, like he was the one that was steadily loosing blood.

“I want you to put an end to this cruelty, Will.” Hannibal’s grip moved down on his arm and he took his hand in his own. “I’d rather perish than exist in this reality where you deny yourself. You have to set us free, one way or the other.” With feather-light touches, he guided Will’s hand to his neck, letting his fingers close around his throat. “You and I have been suspended over the abyss ever since that night, caught in the moment you tipped us over the edge. I have grown tired of waiting for you to pull us up again. If you find yourself unable to embrace your true nature, I must insist you kill me now and end both of our suffering.”

Will could feel Hannibal’s tendons shift under his palm and the soft bump of his larynx as he spoke. He was close enough to smell the shampoo in Hannibal’s hair, lingering above the metallic scent of blood like rose pedals on water. Sucking in air through his teeth, he tried to evoke what he had felt while choking on the flesh of his own thumb, choking on the flesh of Abigail’s ear. He gave a small, experimental squeeze. His fingers dug into tense muscle and for a moment, Hannibal’s breath hitched. He squeezed again, this time harder. The fragile walls of Hannibal’s trachea bent under his tightening grip. It wasn’t enough to block his entire airway yet, he could still feel his breath rattling through his chest as it was rising against his own.

He slowly increased the pressure and was startled by an almost alien noise. Hannibal, previously unaffected as he had cut a piece of flesh out of his own arm, was panting. When Will looked up to meet his gaze, his eyes fluttered shut and he turned his head away as much as Will’s locked digits would allow. Using his free hand, Will forced him to turn back.

“Look at me.”, he demanded. Hannibal swallowed hard. Will tightened his grip. “Look at me.”

Hannibal looked. His eyes were clouded with moisture, tears threatening to fall. Will’s hand strained, closing his throat completely. Hannibal didn’t struggle against him. It was almost to easy. A couple more minutes of this and he would go slack in Will’s arms, filling the air with his stench as his muscles relaxed for the very last time. All that would be left afterwards would be for Will to take care of his own affairs, slitting his throat with the pocket knife or using the bed sheets to hang himself. A happy little surprise for the cleaning service. For a ridiculous moment, he wondered how much tip he should leave. 

Hannibal’s lips trembled, forming silent words. One word, Will noticed. The same syllable, over and over again. _Will._ His face had gone soft, almost like he was praying. He was looking at him now, unabashed. Under Will’s hand, his pulse was accelerating, jumping like it was trying to escape his grasp. Will could feel his own pulse, running up his fingers in frantic gallop, as if in desperate need to connect with Hannibal’s.

“I killed a man.”, Will whispered, staring at his reflection in the wetness of Hannibal’s eyes. “It felt good. Not like the dragon, but … good.”

Hannibal opened his mouth, unable to answer with his voice box crushed between Will’s fingers.

Will continued; “He didn’t do anything wrong, he just got a little angry, looked at me the wrong way. Not really something to get yourself killed over. I was sure that I would pity him. Hate myself for what I did, and that I enjoyed it. But I don’t. It was right. I’d do it again, if I could.”

Hannibal’s eyes widened as he understood. A single tear made it’s way from the corner of his eye down the swell of his cheekbone. It ran hot over the back of Will’s hand. Their pulses had merged in their rhythm and Will couldn’t tell where his ended and Hannibal’s started anymore. There was no distinction between Hannibal’s neck and his hand. He was sinking into Hannibal’s flesh, could feel his skin encompass him, growing up his arm until he was fully surrounded. It felt like sinking into the ocean. Will wanted to let himself drown. Closing his eyes, he leaned forward.

When their lips brushed together, Will felt them becoming one. Stars exploded behind his eyelids as Hannibal’s blood shot through his veins, so hot and forceful it almost ruptured his vessels. Hannibal’s thoughts were in his head, bright pictures of blood and fire stumbling over incoherent words in languages that Will had never heard of. He felt the throbbing of Hannibal’s wound on his own arm, felt Hannibal feeding off the oxygen in his lungs while he kept holding his throat shut. He was scared to move, fearing that their mouths had grown together where they touched and that pulling back would rip their skin open. Finally, Hannibal parted his lips and Will tilted his head, deepening the kiss. Hannibal’ hands clung to his nape, fingertips digging into his scalp, hungrily pulling at his curls. Will leaned back into the touch and let himself be held by those hands that could so effortlessly snap a neck. His tongue brushed against teeth that had ripped out throats, and lips that had drunk blood. A mouth which had devoured Will’s enemies and friends alike, and in the end, himself.

They stood like this, consuming each other, for what could have been eternity. When Hannibal’s knees grew weak against his own, Will suddenly remembered the hand that was still clutching his throat. There was no sharp intake of air when he pulled away, just a mournful sigh at the loss of Will’s touch. Hannibal’s chest expanded slowly and Will could feel his heartbeat between them. Their breaths mingled as they rested their foreheads together, and Will could smell – he could _taste_ – the sweet tang Hannibal’s flesh had left behind.

Slowly, Will untangled himself, bringing just enough distance between the two of them to regard the fervent beam that cut across Hannibal’s face as well as his disheveled hair covering pupils blown so wide they threatened to swallow him whole. The red hand print Will’s blood covered palm had left on his throat made it look like they had been ripped apart forcefully, their skin torn off in the process. The thought made Will smile.

“I take it you have decided to live.” Hannibal’s voice was a breathless rasp, the words dry sounds barely scraping past his bruised larynx.

Will stepped back and extended his hand towards him. Hannibal took it.

“For now.”, he answered as he led them towards the bed.

*

Will was woken by the gentle caress of sunbeams on his bare shoulders. Last night’s smells encompassed him and he opened his eyes to the soft skin at the base of Hannibal’s neck. Nestled there, in the crook of the other man’s shoulder, he watched the slow pulsation of his jugular, felt the steady extension of his chest underneath his hand.

 _Alive_ , he thought.

A new Will Graham, reborn amidst salt and blood, finally allowed to rise from the depths of the ocean where he had drowned the empty shell of his beginnings. He felt free. The guilt and confusion of the last weeks had been drained from his body, leaving him weightless and ecstatic. 

Carefully, he slid out of Hannibal’s embrace and got up from the bed. Hannibal stirred, the creases around his eyes deepening as he furrowed his brows, but he didn’t wake up. Will looked down at him. Even now, bruised and dented, his own clotted blood staining the sheets that he slept in, he looked like a Renaissance painting. The delicate line of his iliac crest was barely disguised by the duvet draped around his waist, the muscle surrounding it so defined it could have been sculpted from marble. Ashen streaks fell lazily over his face while the rising sun drew soft shadows under his cheek bones. 

The bloody hand print on his throat had disappeared, washed away by sweat and movement. In its’ stead, a dark bruise had risen, the shape of fingers clearly distinguishable on the battered skin. His neck was swollen pretty badly, he would have trouble speaking for the next few days. Will couldn’t really say that he was sorry about that.

He gathered his clothes from the floor, where they had been discarded hastily in the wake of last night’s events, and dressed himself. The shirt was now completely ruined, a giant blood stain covered almost the entire front. There was some on the pants as well, but their fabric was dark enough for the smaller spots to easily pass as spilled food. He put on his jacket, closing the zipper and covering the mess. 

Their room was in shambles. The floor was covered in rust-colored foot prints and one of the table’s legs had broken off. Will could see a thin crack in the window where he had thrown Hannibal against the glass. The blood puddle underneath hadn’t fully dried yet and he didn’t bother with cleaning it, guessing that it had already discolored the linoleum irreparably. The former eyeball was now a gooey smear across the floor. Somebody must have stepped on it. Will turned his back to the space that looked like it had tried and miserably failed to contain two hurricanes at once, and made his way into the bathroom. 

There was dried blood on Will’s face when he looked at himself in the mirror. He washed it off and tried to bring some order into his unruly curls. His eyes looked darker than he remembered, their usual gunmetal blue now almost sapphire. He looked different in general. His lines were deeper, his edges sharper. It felt like layers upon layers of distorting lenses had been carved away around him, finally allowing himself to see clearly. He reached out to touch his reflection, his finger resting against their two-dimensional counterparts on the cool glass. _Alive._

Will took the car into the nearest town. Heavy rain clouds had yielded to a clear, cornflower sky and puddles were shrinking in the unobscured sun. He cranked down his window and let his arm dangle in the warm spring breeze. After a ten minute drive down the state route he entered what was hardly more than a church and a convenience store separated by a mostly deserted crossroad. Still, it was the biggest bit of civilization he had exposed himself to since they had gone on the run together. It should have made him wary, if not outright nervous. But Will had rarely in his life felt as untouchable as he did now. The small taste of freedom they had attained wasn’t this fragile thing anymore, subjected to the inevitability of their eventual capture. It had grown into an indomitable fire, razing everything in its’ way to the ground. Will dared anyone to recognize him. He would tear them apart.

He strolled the aisles of the convenience store for something more nourishing than baked beans. After settling for a box of oatmeal and some fruits, he ventured into the clothing section. Two sets of shrink wrapped undershirts and boxers ended up in his basket before he stopped in front of a plain gray scarf. It was pretty, even in its’ obvious cheapness. Nowhere near the extravagant silk and chiffon fabrics Hannibal would usually wear of course, but it would cover the marks on his neck just fine. Will tossed it next to his other purchases. 

On his way to the check-out, he passed a newspaper rack and gave it the obligatory scan for any reports on Hannibal and him. On the second shelf from below, he struck gold. The _Tattler_ , printed cousin to Freddie Lounds’s notorious _TattleCrime.com_ , glared back at him from its’ bright red and yellow layout. Hannibal’s mugshot was on the cover. In accusatory bold capitals, the headline proclaimed:

**HANNIBAL LECTER’S VICTIMS: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?**

Will stifled a laughter. The lead the FBI had on them had to really be a weak one, if that was the most interesting thing Freddie could pull out of her ass. He picked up the magazine and flicked through the pages. The main story was on page nine.

_The infamous cannibal and his accomplice are still on the run – we have spoken to those that have survived the horrors of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter._

Unsurprisingly, ‘spoken to’ turned out to be quite the exaggeration. The page was littered in pictures, visibly taken without consent or knowledge, of the people Will had known in a different life. There was Jack, his hand lifted defensively against the camera flash, silent profanities manifesting in his opened mouth. Chilton, in a wheelchair, outrage painted over his lip-less face.

There was a picture of Molly too, out with the dogs, Wally halfway hidden behind her swaying overcoat. Will’s heart didn’t wrench at the sight of them. He felt like flipping through an old photo album and recognizing distant relatives he might have seen at a party once before. It wasn’t even bittersweet. It was adequate. He noted with some relief that Molly wasn’t wearing her wedding ring anymore. He had lost his own somewhere along the way, hadn’t really noticed that it was gone until now that he was thinking about it. Perplex, he stared at the empty spot on his left hand, almost amused by the notion of how much a tiny piece of jewelry used to mean to him. Promises he couldn’t have kept, hidden away behind a thin band of gold. A small sliver of pretense holding together the farce that had been his sanity. He thought that whatever bound him and Hannibal wouldn’t need to be proven by symbols, couldn’t be quantified by something as materialistic as a ring. They had permanently etched their devotion into each other’s skin and branded their obsession into each other’s mind.

The article finished with two photographs of Alana, caught in conversation with a blond woman Will only recognized on a second glance as Bedelia Du Maurier. The pictures were blurry, taken from afar and through what seemed to be a suburban hedge. The caption read:

_Dr. Alana Bloom, Lecter’s ex-lover and incarcerator, bonded over shared trauma with Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier, Lecter’s ex-psychiatrist and presumably also lover. Both women have fled the traumatic memories connected to their east coast lives and have since been seen on multiple outings together. Dr. Bloom’s wife, Margot Verger, head of the Verger meat packing dynasty, has been strangely absent from those meetings._

_Oh Freddie_ , Will thought, shaking his head at her sensationalism. He was about to put the _Tattler_ back on the rack, when something in the last picture caught his eye. In the background, framed between a massive oak tree and Alana’s chocolate-colored curls, was a seafood restaurant. Stylized drawings of clams and salmon garnished its’ display window and a lonely set of plastic chairs and table stood out front, dominated by a navy striped parasol. Above the entrance a yellow sign announced the restaurant’s name: _Oysters of Astoria_.

Will had been to Astoria once before, as a teenager, but the turn of the millennium lay between then and now and he wouldn’t have recognized the soft green hills and the ever-clouded sky. Now, after he had deciphered the sign, the picture’s west coast scenery stood out to him like a sore thumb. He remembered Hannibal’s promise to Alana, and his own to Bedelia. _Meat is back on the menu._ It truly was, this time for good, the order placed and the tableware set. Alana and Bedelia had crossed a continent to get away from them, settled in the shade of a much bigger, mightier ocean after the Atlantic wasn’t enough to end Hannibal and Will. What a foolish sham of safety. 

He slipped the _Tattler_ into his basket and got in line for the check-out. While the cashier scanned his items, he gave her his biggest smile.

When he returned to the motel, Hannibal stood in the bathroom in his underwear, washing their clothes in the sink. Soap bubbles popped between his fingers as he ran his hands through the murky water. He had bandaged his forearm and the crisp white mull stood out starkly against his tanned skin. Will pulled his shirt over his head and stepped out of his jeans. He walked up to the sink without a word, submerged his clothes and watched as the blood turned the water from brown to red. They stood next to each other silently, shoulders occasionally brushing while their hands kneaded the dirty fabrics. When their knuckles touched, Hannibal intertwined their fingers. He lifted Will’s hand to his mouth and kissed the soaked stitches of his stump. Pink droplets of water made their way down Will’s wrist before they got caught on the hairs of his arm.

“Your wounds have healed perfectly. We can remove the stitches today.” His voice was even worse off than it had been the previous night, his accent unwontedly thick around the hoarse vowels. Still, he didn’t seem to bother with condensing his usual lengthy orations.

Will brushed against the raised tissue on Hannibal’s abdomen with his free hand, fingers tracing the neatly threaded sutures. “What about your wounds?”

“They took their time at first. But it seems like now the clefts have finally mended.” He smiled fondly. “Shall we?”

Will sat on the bed with a water-filled bowl between his feet. Freshly sterilized scissors and tweezers were drying on stripes of toilet paper on the night stand, next to a cotton ball roll and a bottle of isopropyl. Hannibal emerged from the bathroom, scrubbed hands lifted in front of him like he was entering an OR instead of a shabby motel room. Will had to bite back a laugh.

“So _now_ we worry about disinfection?” He gestured to the bed sheets, still covered in the blood Hannibal’s wound had seeped all night while it lay uncovered and dirty.

“It’s never too late to reevaluate one’s priorities.”

Hannibal knelt between Will’s legs, plucked a cotton ball from its’ wrapping and doused it generously in isopropyl. Will flinched slightly as he dabbed it to his cheek, whether it was from the sharp sting of the rubbing alcohol or the delicate touch of Hannibal’s finger pads, he could not say. He closed his eyes as a warm hand encompassed his chin, tilting his cheek towards the light. 

“Do you wish to talk about last night?”

“No.”, Will said in between the scissors metallic snipping sounds. The drag of the thread was hardly palpable through the insensitive scar tissue and Will opened one eye to watch Hannibal drop the first suture into the water bowl. “Not while you’re holding sharp objects to my face.”

A chuckle rippled through Hannibal’s body and Will could feel his chest rumple against his thighs and his warm breath on his face.

“I believe it is my turn to threaten you with sharp objects, if one was to keep score.”

“I didn’t know we were keeping score.”

Another snip, and the second suture fell into the bowl.

“You called us a zero-sum game once.”, Hannibal hummed. “An observation which requires a certain amount of score-keeping.”

Will caught Hannibal’s wrist and locked eyes with him, ignoring the sudden scratch of tweezers against his skin. “I have no interest in keeping up this battle of wits that you seem to think we are still engaging in.” His voice was stern, but there was no anger in it, only vehemence. “I have stopped fighting you, but that doesn’t mean that I gave up. You are mine as much as I am yours.”

“I know.”, was the only thing Hannibal said.

“Good.” He let go of his hand and watched as Hannibal dragged another cotton pad over where he had scratched him with the tweezers. It came away bloody.

“Seems like we can hardly be in close proximity without hurting each other.”, Hannibal stated while studying the scarlet drops embedded in the soft white material. 

Will smoothed a thumb over his cheekbone, feeling the light dent of the scar that sat there. “There are no human concepts as closely intertwined as desire and pain. Violence sparks passion, while our most atrocious acts of brutality are inspired by love.” The words coming out of his mouth sounded so much like Hannibal’s that he was startled into a smile.

“Love,”, Hannibal repeated, the expression on his face almost insecure, “Not the inevitable merging of two co-depended minds?”

“Love.”, Will confirmed and leaned down to kiss the smile that was spreading on Hannibal’s lips.

After finishing with Will’s cheek, Hannibal repeated the process on his shoulder and thumb before laying down on the mattress to have his own stitches cut. Will followed his instructions tentatively at first, slowly gaining more confidence with every knot that he opened. When it was done, he cleansed the skin with antiseptic and let Hannibal sit back up. Eyeing Will’s work thoroughly, he enounced a satisfied hum. 

Will, who had suddenly remembered his forenoon purchases, got up to retrieve his bag from the coat hanger. He fished out the scarf and returned to Hannibal, who gave him a curious glance.

“As much as I like the thought of you parading my hand print around for the world to see, I think we’d do good averting as much attention as we can.” He wrapped the scarf around Hannibal’s neck and stood back to consider his work.

Hannibal, despite being shirtless, still managed to look dignified with his new neck-wear. His lips curled into a sentimental smirk as his fingers toyed with the scarf’s fringes. Will was already rummaging through the bag’s remaining contents for the second surprise when Hannibal started to speak, his voice thoughtful and quiet.

“What are we to do, Will Graham, now that you have finally returned us to the world of the living?”

Will smiled. It was as if Hannibal had read his mind. He pulled the _Tattler_ from the depths of the brown paper shopping bag and handed it to him.

“We burn it down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter turned out a little shorter, mainly because this felt like the perfect sentence to end on, even though I had a little more planned. But don't despair! That's just gonna end up in the next chapter. I also settled on a total of nine chapters now, so if you made it this far, you're halfway through this mess! Thanks for sticking around :)  
> The star * (Google tells me this is called an asterisk, you learn something new everyday) marks the midpoint of this story as well as the turning point for Will (aka the strategically placed sex-star :P).  
> The quote in the beginning is from 'Carmilla', an 1870s Gothic novel with quite a few Hannigram parallels. It's about lesbian vampires, so you might wanna check it out ;) I got the idea from [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yg9_wThirc&ab_channel=SeanTalks) incredibly smart video essay on Gothic romances, which compares the book with 'Hannibal'. I completely adore this Meta & wish I had this guy's brain, so give him some love.  
> And yes, I am aware that _technically_ Hannibal was the one comparing them to a zero-sum game, but it fitted the conversation so much better & also who cares what came out of who's mouth if you & your murder husband have begun to blur & are curious whether either of you can survive separation?  
> As always, kudos and comments are appreciated and you can find me on [tumblr](https://dekubitusrex.tumblr.com/).


	6. The Trail's End

Will watched Hannibal browse through the _Tattler_. He had put on one of the shirts Will had brought from the store, a basic crew neck in gray polyester. Will had guessed his size wrong and the fabric strained across his chest and shoulders. The scarf was still around his neck. When he got to the main story, the corners of his mouth turned up.

He tapped a finger against the page. “According to this piece of quality journalism, Uncle Jack’s employment with the FBI has been terminated.” 

“Good for Jack.”

“Good for us.” He looked up at Will from his spot at the now three-legged table. They had propped it against the window sill so it would stay upright. “You bought me a boulevard magazine as a keepsake of all the people that want me dead? Chilton is looking terrific, by the way.”

“Keep reading.”, Will nudged him on. He was growing impatient, barely able to contain his anticipation. His fingers clenched in and out of fists as he circled through the room.

Hannibal’s eyes flitted over the rest of the article until they stilled on the picture of Alana and Bedelia. He tilted his head as he considered what he saw. “The damned are joining forces in the face of hellfire.”

Will stopped the circling and shrugged. “There’s safety in numbers. The sheep form a herd to startle the wolf.”

“I am not startled.”

“Neither am I.” He sat down on the chair opposite Hannibal. The plastic creaked under his shifting weight. “Look again. See the restaurant in the background?”

Hannibal squinted at the photograph, then put the magazine down when a complacent smile snuck onto his face. “Astoria. They’re in Oregon.” 

Will nodded. “Or they were at least, at some point. In any case, it seems like a good place to start looking.”

Hannibal crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Are you suggesting what I believe you’re suggesting?” His tone was clinical, but Will could feel the excitement buzzing underneath his skin.

“I’m suggesting that we fulfill some of your promises.”

“Alana is your friend. The thought of killing her doesn’t upset you?”

“Alana never saw me as more than a convenient study object. She has stopped trusting me years ago. You saw to that.”

Crossing his own legs, he mirrored Hannibal’s pose. The other man’s fingers drummed a muffled rhythm onto his knees as he regarded Will thoughtfully. It almost felt like they were back in therapy, in Baltimore, only that the sumptuous armchairs and Hannibal’s opulently adorned office had been exchanged for uncomfortable plastic seats and a half-destroyed motel room and that Hannibal was wearing sweatshop clothes instead of a three-piece suit. 

“Does the spite you harbor against her make her deserving of murder?”

Will couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s not like you haven’t killed for less.”

“I have. Still, I want to ensure that you are as committed as you perceive yourself to be.”

“Hannibal.” Will leaned forward and reached across the table, grabbing the hand that had now ceased its’ quiet drumming. He let his thumb smooth along the soft fleshy insides of long, elegant fingers until he found the steady beat of Hannibal’s pulse. “Any reluctance I had about who I am and where my commitments lie died with the man on the bridge last night. I drowned it in the creek. That should be all the proof you need.”

The skepticism in Hannibal’s eyes seemed to fade at the sound of his name. He hesitated, eyes darting to where their interlaced hands rested on the table. “I don’t need a sacrifice as testament of your devotion.”

“She’s not a sacrifice. She had you locked away for three years and now she’s married into an institution that has been known to employ actual bounty hunters to go after you. She’s a threat to our freedom. Eliminating her is only wise.”

There was a long pause and then Hannibal nodded, approving. “And what about our other friend, Dr. Du Maurier?”

Will felt his teeth bare into a sadistic grin. “Bedelia needs to be put in her place. She thinks so highly of herself for having glimpsed behind the veil, she almost made a career out of it.” 

“If I didn’t know any better, I would surmise you are jealous, my dear.”, Hannibal mocked.

The fine hairs on Will’s nape tickled his skin as they stood up. Jealousy wasn’t nearly sufficient to describe what he felt towards the woman that had slipped into Hannibal’s darkness as effortlessly as she had slipped out, unscathed and steadfast. It wasn’t hard to imagine his fingers around her neck, and the complacency falling from her face as he pressed them together. His grip on Hannibal’s hand tightened. Hannibal gloated, his assumptions confirmed in the wordless gesture.

“Quite right, too.”, he concluded. “Oregon, here we come.”

They gave their motel room the most superficial cleaning. The ruined sheets were dumped into the motel’s garbage chute and the nightstand pulled over the enduring pink stain Hannibal’s blood had left on the linoleum floor. It still looked awful enough to surely scandalize the cleaning service, but it wouldn’t trigger a police investigation, at least not until drought and time would resurface the corpse of the unfortunate mustached man. They left in the early hours of the next morning. Hannibal gave the room a last look-over, then strode to the window and pulled the curtains shut. Their metal rings clattered along the rod as the yellowed lace covered the crack in the glass. Will shouldered the plastic bags containing their clothes and rations and they made their way to the car.

Dim gray morning light still muted the vast greens of the riverside landscape. The wind rustled the young crops on the fields while crickets and frogs recited their arias on the embankment. Otherwise, it was almost eerily silent. They didn’t encounter another vehicle until they passed into Iowa over two hours later, and Will, dazzled by the sun’s reflection in the other car’s windscreen, pulled the visor down. The landscape had hardly changed in the past week, acres the size of small countries stretched underneath a clear blue sky with fuzzy white clouds, like an endless Monet painting. Hannibal pointed out the occasional bird, circling the fields in search of inattentive rodents, and Will gave a short lecture about trout fishing when they passed Lake Red Rock, but apart from that their time was spend in comfortable silence. 

They stopped north of Omaha to eat and swap cars and Will hot-wired a black Toyota while Hannibal fried eggs above their little gas cooker.

“Where’d you get those from?”, Will asked, while he greedily shoveled them into his mouth. Hot egg yolk ran over his chin, matting his beard, and he halfheartedly wiped at it with the back of his hand.

Hannibal gave him a disapproving look, thoroughly chewing the neatly cut bits of his own egg before he spoke. “A pigeon’s nest by the roadside. Abandoned, sadly. It would have been my pleasure to serve you actual pigeon.”

Will absently scanned the silver-maple trees that lined the road. A starling stared back at him from the canopy and he wondered if it was aware what he was eating. “How do you know it was abandoned?”

“I smelled it.”

A small chuckle escaped Will and he covered his mouth with his hands as to not further appall Hannibal with his eating habits. “Of course you did.”

The next day, they crossed into the Great Plains. It was Hannibal’s turn to drive and Will leaned his head against the passenger window and gaped at the infinite sea of dew-covered grass. A breeze gently rolled through sturdy weeds in ghostly shades of silver and purple and lush greens turned into golden browns while well-kept farmland was replaced by rugged hills and scrawny trees. The scenery was so distinctively clichéd that Will wouldn’t have been surprised to see wild stallions dashing through the grassland. As evening approached, he could make out the blue silhouettes of the Rocky Mountains, minuscule in the distant west. 

Shortly after they entered Wyoming, Hannibal brought the car to a halt. “Look.”, he said, pointing towards an elevation on the left of the road. Will had to lean across him in order to see. It took him a few seconds to adjust to the evening light, but when he did, his eyes widened in amazement. 

A herd of bison was making its’ way across the small ridge, their fur starkly black against the setting sun. Will could hear their labored roaring, mingled with the rhythmic tapping of their hooves. One of them stopped and turned its’ head towards them, its’ breath clouded the air around the broad nostrils. It was massive, the size of a draft horse, with horns thicker than his arms. Although he couldn’t see its’ eyes, Will could feel it looking directly at him. A shiver crept down his spine.

“Quite the sight, don’t you agree?”, Hannibal mused and when Will didn’t answer, he added; “When cautiously prepared, their loins make excellent-”

“Shh!” He silenced Hannibal with a playful smack to his shoulder. The bison continued its’ climb up the slope and Will followed it with marveling eyes until it disappeared behind the hill’s smooth crest.

He dreamed about it that night as he lay curled against Hannibal’s back, his face pressed into the brand between his shoulder blades. Their rest spot was so secluded from any light source that the Milky Way was easily visible on the cloudless firmament. Countless celestial bodies spanned across the horizon in a swivel of gold and blue, like a generous brush stroke, trailing specks of stars like small drops of paint.

In his dreams, Will walked next to the bison as it climbed the ridge. Tumbleweeds crossed their path and a hawk circled above their heads, its’ shadow an ever-present companion on the soil. They walked until the red sand underneath their feet turned into dust, and then into ash. When Will looked up from the gray cinders between his toes, they had reached the ocean. The waves whispered sweet promises into his ears as they rose in front of him, climbing higher until they blocked out the sun and all Will could see was water. He closed his eyes and put his head back as the wave broke above him. When salt water flushed his face, he smiled against Hannibal’s skin.

The VW they stole south of Yellowstone was so old, it had a cassette player instead of the usual narrow slit of a CD compartment. The radio didn’t have a display, and Will quickly figured that they wouldn’t get a signal this far out anyway, no matter how much he turned the unlabeled regulators. He watched Hannibal dig through the cassette collection in the glove compartment, a bemused smile on his face as he pulled out numerous family-friendly audio books, a couple of blues rock records and one mix-tape with a hand-drawn cover, evidently made by a child.

“Wonderful.”, Will sighed. “We stole a kid’s first record collection.”

He tried to argue for one of the blues rock tapes, a live recording of John Mayall, but Hannibal, who’s patience towards popular music was running thin, resisted vehemently. In the end, they settled for a reading of Moby Dick.

Besides being old, the VW was also small. There wasn’t enough room for both of them on the propped down backbench, so when night fell, Hannibal stretched out in the passenger seat instead. His left arm rested on the center console and Will reached out to touch his bandaged skin. Through the mull he could feel the rifts and craters the knife had left behind. The scarring would be horrendous, the muscle never again completely intact. Hannibal struggled to bend his arm further than a right angle and his ability to grab and lift things was now almost as compromised as Will’s own. He remembered how he had felt Hannibal’s pain in his own arm when they had merged and wondered if Hannibal had ached in the same way when he had gutted Will all those years back on his kitchen floor. He squeezed the arm once, teasing, before he slipped to the front and into Hannibal’s lap.

As the west grew closer, Will felt himself growing more and more tense. His dreams about the ocean turned into nightmares about blood. The dead man on the bridge came to him at night, and his face was Alana's and Bedelia's, the face of the woman in the beach house and that of her son. A rolodex full of identities. In the end, it always turned into Hannibal, a grinning skull with bits of flesh hanging from his empty eye sockets. Will woke up gasping, clutching Hannibal's shoulders like he expected him to turn into smoke between his fingers.

The Rocky Mountains took Will’s breath away. Never before had he stood somewhere this high, seen lakes this clear and forests this wild. Hannibal was similarly affected. When they crossed the 8000 feet line, they left the car beneath a pair of cottonwood trees, ventured up a short trail to a rocky ledge and watched the sun set from there. Hannibal joked about steep drops and deathly plunges while both of them sipped rose hip tea from a thermos jug.

“We could come back here, after we’re finished in Oregon.”, Will suggested. “Maybe stay for a while.”

Hannibal’s head was in his lap, and Will was playing with the soft strands of his hair.

“You enjoy the calm.”, he observed as the dusk painted his face red. He lifted a hand to Will’s mouth and followed the curve of his cupid bow with his index finger. “If it’s solitude you long for, you shall have it. We can go anywhere you wish to go, and stay as long as you wish to stay.”

Will leaned his head against the tree he was using as a backrest, feeling the light pluck as his hairs caught on the bark. He closed his eyes and thought of a cabin, plain and secluded, on the shore of a turquoise lake, wedged between mountains so high their peaks disappeared above the clouds. There would be a jetty with a small boat, and the smell of conifers in the air. Maybe a dog or two. An unfamiliar warmth spread through his body, originating in his solar plexus and rushing through his veins until it had reached his toes and fingertips. He didn’t just enjoy the calm, he yearned for it. He almost dreaded their arrival in the city, the feeling of being stared at, othered, muzzled by the collective noise of minds as gray as the concrete that surrounded them. Almost.

"You worry about what awaits us at the coast." Hannibal paused. "I will not force you to kill if that is not what you desire." 

"But that's not the truth, is it?" The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and Will could see no more than the outlines of Hannibal's face. "I desire to kill and if I wouldn't, I wouldn't be here with you. I would have ended up on your dinner plate as soon as I inconvenienced you. Your affection towards my predisposition is what bought me my life."

Hannibal made no effort to negate his statements.

In the morning, Will fixed himself a makeshift fishing line with their leftover suture materials and went down to the pond that lay close to where they had set up camp. He caught two rainbow trouts and Hannibal gutted them on the VW’s hood and fried them with berries he had found in the underbrush. Their pale orange flesh and was tender enough to practically melt on Will’s tongue, spreading nut-like flavor through his mouth. It was the closest they had gotten to a shared feast since a very long time and Will found himself brimming with anticipation for those to come. There was a celebratory banquet pending for them in Astoria, even if the guests of honor weren’t yet aware of their invitation. 

They went for a swim afterwards, washing the dust the prairie had left behind from their skin. The pond was so clear, Will could see the ground long after his feet had stopped touching it. Small silver fish darted away from him with every stroke he made through the freezing water. It felt good to stretch his muscles again after endless hours behind the wheel and he could sense the exertion pouring from the knotted tissue of his scars as he submerged his head. For a moment, he found himself forgetting where they were going and what was waiting for them there.

When he emerged from the pond, laughing and trembling from the cold, Hannibal was waiting for him on the shore with a towel and a fresh set of clothes.

As their trail through the mountains became steeper, the car kept breaking down, usually preceded by an ill-omened clatter from behind the glove compartment. On a particularly rough patch, the engine overheated, trailing white steam from its’ radiator. Will uttered a defeated sigh as the needle jumped into the red part of the temperature gauge and brought the car to the side of the road.

Upon propping up the hood, he couldn’t find any leak or clogging. The water pump and radiator fan looked alright as well, which left them only with waiting until the engine would cool down on its’ own.

Hannibal poked his head around the hood to inspect the mess.

"Seems like something is trying to keep us here" 

"Maybe so." Will scratched through his beard. "Some higher forces protecting humanity from us." 

"What leads you to believe they're not protecting us?" 

Will considered that for a moment. "A good luck charm in form of a faulty engine?" 

Hannibal nodded. "Stranger things have happened."

"To us, certainly." 

"Great blessings and tragedies alike. And still I can't deny that the outcome has been somewhat beneficial." 

Will had to smile despite himself. He had left a family behind, he was covered in scars and he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were burning so bright that soon there would be nothing left of them. Still, he couldn’t find it in himself to care all that much. He felt elevated, high. Molly and Alana and Jack and all the others felt like mere ants beneath him, they went on, they lived, but they didn’t _understand_. They wouldn’t even notice if he crushed them.

He existed next to Hannibal behind the veil, and that existence was divine. There should have been hurt and anger between them, any normal person would have never been able to forgive what they had done to each other. And as much as Hannibal regretted, as much as he tried to mend the cracks of the past, Will understood that their present was growing from the bloodied soil of their history. Their bound had been consummated between the guts of the dragon and the teeth of Randall Tier as much as through the fire Hannibal had started in Will’s brain and the lies that Will had slipped onto Hannibal’s dinner table. 

It had also been consummated beneath Abigail’s pale fingers, trying desperately to hold together the gash in her throat as she had died in Will’s arms. A doll, discarded after she was no longer fun to play with. Will thought of her often, sky blue eyes that had looked up at monsters, unafraid as they extended their clawed hands to pull her in. 

He sometimes wished for her to be there with them, as more than a figure of his imagination, flesh and blood, her chestnut hair tumbled by the mountain winds. And even if it made his heart grow heavy, he knew it was for the better that she was not. He kept her in the rivers of his memory, shaped her like it suited him, a surrogate daughter that embraced him and all his demons, that smiled at him and Hannibal like they were caring fathers and not the men that had ripped her from the mouth of one beast just to have her swallowed by another.

They left the VW behind in central Idaho, thoroughly beaten down and hardly drive-able anymore. It was almost bittersweet, even if the new car could cover twice the distance in the same amount of time and the nights were a lot less cold when they could sleep next to each other on the back seats. Will had taken a liking to the VW, its’ worn down engine had presented a welcome challenge, a project to keep his focus sharp. Even more so, he had taken a liking to the landscape the car had more or less successfully navigated them through and every so often he found himself longingly glancing at the shrinking outlines of the Rockys in the reflection of the rear view mirror.

Two weeks after leaving the motel in Illinois, they finally reached the Pacific coast. They hit water in Newport, exchanged cars and turned north to follow the coastal highway to Astoria. The road was embedded into reddish basalt cliffs, overlooking long stretches of beach. Windswept cedars clung to what little support they found between moss-covered rocks, their thick gnarly roots splitting the stone in the process. The air was brimming with the screams of seagulls and the smell of kelp. Will spotted the occasional seal sleeping on the shore, their jet-black fur sparkling in the morning sun.

Astoria sat at the top of a peninsular, shielded from the weight of the Pacific in the delta of the Columbia River. The bridge that crossed into town was an over three miles long monstrosity, supported by trunk-like pillars of green steel. They found a motel close to the highway and Hannibal stayed behind while Will ventured into town to look for the seafood restaurant. 

Dense gray clouds had tightened across the sky and Will cursed himself for leaving his jacket at the motel when he felt the first rain drops on his face. Astoria wasn’t nearly as big as he remembered and he only had to ask a handful of people before someone pointed him in the right direction. With hunched up shoulders he made his way up a badly maintained street while his worn out shoes slowly filled with water. Small shops lined the roadside, one of them a fishing gear store which might have caught Will’s attention if he wouldn’t have been so occupied with the rain. He only looked up to check every other house number, to make sure he hadn’t walked to far, otherwise he kept his head down in a futile attempt to protect himself from the elements.

It took him a few seconds to recognize the oak tree. It looked different from this angle, its’ treetop wider and its’ branches lower. Behind it, he could see the parasol, now folded, rivulets of rain running down its’ striped canvas. When he stepped around the tree, the entrance to _Oysters of Astoria_ lay directly in front of him. It was a shabby looking thing, the artwork on the windows was corny at best and only half the neon tubes proclaiming the restaurant’s name seemed to be working. A sign on the frosted glass of the door read _Open_ in blue italic letters. Will pushed inside and let out a relieved breath for finally having escaped the rain.

“This is why people usually take an umbrella with them.” The voice was husky and deep, roughened by years of excessive smoking. He turned towards its’ owner. Behind the bar that cut halfway through the room stood a short but sturdy looking woman, a dishtowel over her shoulder and an empty whiskey tumbler in her hand. She was clad in typical waitress attire, the apron around her waist covering black slacks and a button down. Red glasses adorned with tiny rhinestones sat atop her frilled hair, which was dark except for the prominent white streaks growing from her temples. Her skin looked way too sun-kissed for someone living in the most humid city of the United States.

“Sorry.”, he mumbled as he realized that he was dripping all over the floor.

Only one of the restaurant’s tables was occupied, an elderly couple played cards in the far corner of the room while faint smells of fish and lemon hovered from the kitchen.

“Never mind. It’s probably cleaner now than before.” The waitress pulled another glass from the soap filled sink, gave it a quick rinse and started polishing it with the dish towel. “You want something to warm up?”

Will considered her offer for a moment, before deciding that it probably couldn’t hurt. He nodded and she poured him a generous cup of coffee. 

“You’re not from here, are you?”, she asked as he slid onto one of the bar stools.

“What gave me away?”

She chuckled. “Apart from your accent, I’d say it’s your lack of weather-appropriate clothing.” 

Will lifted a hand in defense. “The sun was out half an hour ago.” 

They exchanged a smile.

“The weather is crazy this time of the year. You better get used to it.” She crossed her arms and regarded him thoughtfully. “What brings you to Astoria?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

A bell chimed loudly in the kitchen before she could inquire any further. “That’s my cue.”, she apologized and disappeared through the steel door. She emerged a few seconds later with two plates of steaming filet and rosemary potatoes and set them down in front of the couple.

“You’re looking for someone.”, she repeated after returning to her spot behind the bar. “And what kind of someone might that be?”

“Two someones, actually.” He watched her eyebrows raise to her hairline. “Friends of mine. Maybe you’ve seen them around.”

“It’s not like we see a lot of people here.” She nodded towards the deserted tables. “What do they look like?”

“One is a blonde woman in her mid-forties, the other ten years younger with dark brown hair.”

“There’s a lot of blondes and brunettes coming in here.”

“You would remember those. They dress in an upscale kind of way. Like they’re very well off.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you a cop or something?”

It took all of Will’s effort not to laugh. It had been some time since he had last been asked that question. He briefly entertained the thought of affirming it, thinking that a police men looking for two missing people might be less suspicious than a gruff stranger asking for pretty, rich women in a dingy bar. After catching a glimpse of the skeptic hostility that had suddenly manifested in her face, he reconsidered. 

“No.” He tried his best at an innocuous smile. “Just a concerned friend.”

She studied him carefully. Will could see that there was something she knew, even if she still pondered on whether or not to tell him. He didn’t mind. He could be patient. If she decided to keep quiet, he would simply wait for her shift to finish, hidden beneath the shadows of the oak tree, and make her tell him. Lost in thought, his fingers started playing with the outlines of the Swiss Army knife, covered under the fabric of his jeans pocket.

Before he could map out his plan any more, she opened her mouth to answer. 

“I don’t know about your brunette friend, but there’s a blonde women that comes in here every once in a while. She definitely dresses like she’s supposed to be somewhere else. Our Billy in the kitchen’s got a crush on her. Can’t say that I blame him.”

Will could barely contain his excitement. This was almost too easy. He pulled the picture he had cut out from the _Tattler_ from his pocket and bent it so that Alana and the Astorian landscape were concealed behind the fold. Sliding it across the counter, he asked, “Is that her?”

“So you _are_ a cop?”, the woman patted his arm jokingly. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, your secret’s safe with me.” With that, she slid her reading glasses onto her nose and bent over the grainy photograph. “Yes, that’s her.”

Will’s heart had started thumping so loudly he was worried she would hear it. “Do you know where she lives?”

She pushed her glasses back into her hair and returned the photo to him. If she noticed his shaking fingers, she probably blamed it on the cold, or the caffeine. 

“No idea, she doesn’t talk much.” 

_Lucky you_ , Will thought, remembering Bedelia quite differently.

The waitress started chewing on her bottom lip, considering. “But she’s here every week. Would you like me to give her a message? Or your phone number?”

“A message will do.” He tapped his fingers on the counter while he contemplated what he wanted to tell her. When the idea came to him, he couldn’t help but grin. “Tell her I came to visit an old flame.”

“And from whom should I tell her that?”

Will only smirked. “She will know.”

He spent the next few days lingering around the restaurant. An intersection just down the road proved as an excellent spot to park the car, a few trees obscured it for anybody peeking out of the restaurant’s windows and yet he had perfect view on anybody entering or leaving. Slumped down behind the wheel, a baseball cap he had bought for three dollars pulled low over his face, he waited for hours on end, returning to the motel itchy and restless. It was even worse when Hannibal was keeping watch. Alone in their motel room, Will paced like a caged tiger, only stopping to check the clunky prepaid phone he had gotten for himself. 

The risk of being noticed grew with each day they spent in the same location. Every time he drove back from the restaurant he wondered if he would be greeted with a bloodbath. All employees of the motel slaughtered, or worse, Hannibal gone. He kept looking over his shoulder, searching for eyes that lingered a little too long or faces clad in poorly concealed recognition. When Hannibal went out, he braced himself for the possibility that he might not come back. Even the beard he was slowly growing couldn’t conceal Hannibal’s distinguishable features and if somebody recognized him, there would be no chance at negotiation. He would be shot on sight. The FBI had surely learned from their mistakes. Will flinched at the mental image of Hannibal’ limp body in the gutter, half his head blown off while blood and brain matter leaked onto the pavement.

Hannibal seemed to take all of this with his usual ease. He lay sprawled out on the bed, flicking through the motel’s copy of the _Yellow Pages_ , while Will was counting their shrinking stack of cash.

“If she doesn’t show up in the next three days, we’re going to have to leave.”, Will stated, causing Hannibal to abandon his reading. 

He sat up, closed the _Yellow Pages_ in his lap and folded his hands on top of it. “Then we will leave.”

Will shot him an incredulous look. “What about Bedelia?”

“There will be other opportunities. Better ones, certainly. We should act with care. I do not intend to celebrate her demise behind barred doors.”

“She’s going to get away.”, Will huffed. “Escaping the claws of the beast by a mere hair’s breadth. Again.” He forced his jaw to relax as he felt his teeth grinding against each other.

“Patience, Will.”, Hannibal purred. His voice was almost back to its’ usual smooth velvet, the bruise on his neck had faded short of a few faint marks low on his throat. Will felt instantly calmed by his full baritone. “You might even find her tomorrow.”

As per usual, Hannibal was right. Bedelia looked so out of place between the rundown shops and the potholes in the road that Will wouldn’t have missed her even half asleep. She wore a pencil skirt and blazer in cherry red, fitting pumps and a feathered hat so huge it bordered on absurdity. Her golden curls where as meticulously coiffed as ever, accentuating her pointed features in gentle waves. He jerked against the steering wheel when he spotted her, nearly hitting the car horn and blowing his cover. She disappeared into the restaurant and Will seized the opportunity to collect his breath and thoughts.

Part of him wanted to run after her, rip her to pieces there and then. Get it over with, grab Hannibal and disappear into the wilderness, never to be seen again. There was another part, quiet, nothing more than a buzz at the back of his skull. _Leave_ , that part said. _Leave now, and nobody has to die. Leave now and nobody has to ever know what became of you. No traces left behind. Sweet and easy peace._ Will chased that part off like he would a fly.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and called the only number he had saved. Hannibal answered with a hum. 

“She’s here!” Will struggled to keep his voice from shaking. “I just saw her, she went into the restaurant and I- you were right. I can’t believe I found her.” His rambling ceased as he heard Hannibal’s amused chuckle at the other end of the line.

“Would you be content in the knowledge that I told you so?”, he teased.

A nervous cackle escaped Will’s throat. “Smug prick. What do I do now?”

“Now you wait. Once she is on her way, you will follow suit, with a safe distance, naturally. When you reach her quarters, you will message me the address. I will meet you there.”

“Okay.” Will ran a hand through his hair and pressed circles into the tense muscles of his neck.

“And Will?”

“Yes?”

“I must ask you to remain calm. I don’t believe I need to remind you what is at stake.”

Will let out a long sigh. “Thanks, Hannibal, very reassuring.”

“My pleasure.”, Hannibal joshed and hung up the phone.

Bedelia emerged from the restaurant about thirty minutes later. Will only needed to see the panicked look on her face to know that his message had been delivered. She hastily scanned the street, clutching her leather handbag tightly and Will slid further down behind the steering wheel. 

Every last bit of the stage fright he had felt earlier was suddenly gone. His breath was steady, his pulse perfectly calm. He smiled to himself as he turned the key in the ignition. It was going to happen tonight, or not at all. He watched her enter a Rolls-Royce that was even more out of place than she was, gave her a head start, and then pulled onto the road.

He followed her out of town, up a small hill and away from the coast. Behind him, the sun was disappearing into the bay, turning the water into liquid gold. The neighborhood Bedelia led him to was more in line with her finery; Italianate villas loomed over well-kept front lawns, framed by ornate hedges and tall fences, their empty windows staring at him like the intruder he was. Lawn sprinklers rested untouched between richly saturated blades of grass, rendered useless by the continuing rainfall. A Bentley not unlike the one Hannibal had driven before his incarceration stood proudly in one of the driveways and Will watched a woman heave a small child out of the back seat, followed by a tail-wagging dalmatian. 

The house Bedelia stopped in front of was a three-story Victorian style building, flanked by a tower with an onion-shaped roof. Large sash windows encircled by stucco paneling lay embedded into the pine green facade, and midnight blue roof shingles hung over the walls like long, painted lashes. Four pillars held up a voluptuous balustrade just above the entrance and apple trees were planted along the driveway in perfect symmetry. Their bark was so wet from the rain it appeared almost black. Will turned off the road four blocks down, just as Bedelia hurried down the gravel covered path towards the house, and parked his car a few streets away. He unlocked his phone and texted Hannibal his location.

Hannibal showed up twenty minutes later, carrying a massive umbrella even though the downpour had faded to a light trickle. Once he got closer, Will could see what it was he was protecting from the rain. Hannibal was wearing a three-piece suit.

“Where did you-” Will couldn’t help but gape at the lavish material. Clad in formal wear, his hair slicked back and his face freshly shaven, Hannibal looked more like himself than he had in the past three years. _Ready to hunt_ , Will thought.

“Do you truly want to know?”

“Fair point.”

The suit wasn’t tailored to fit him, Will thought that it was pretty obviously stolen, but otherwise it wasn’t a far cry from his usual attire. The velvet jacket was of a deep sacramento, its’ black lapels covered in delicate silver highlights. His pin dot tie was silver as well and disappeared halfway into a cream colored waistcoat that matched the pocket square. Will thought that the brown dress shoes that peaked out beneath the pleated slacks were an especially bold choice.

Hannibal was carrying a big plastic bag under his arm and Will eyed it suspiciously. The hint of a tie stood out beneath its’ clear wrapping.

“We are guests in her home, we should dress accordingly.”, Hannibal explained as he handed him the bag.

Will, who knew a lost battle when he saw it, retreated into the back of the car to change his clothes.

Mercifully, the suit Hannibal had gotten him was a lot less flashy than his own. There was no velvet in sight and no ornaments on the dark blue jacket. Black tie, black shoes, no waistcoat. Will considered himself in the reflection of the tinted windows and figured that it wasn’t half bad. He gave a lukewarm attempt at taming his hair before making his way back to Hannibal.

Hannibal looked him over thoroughly, then smoothed his hands over Will’s shoulders to straighten the jacket. Will couldn’t stop fumbling with his tie.

“Ready?”, he asked and Hannibal nodded.

They strode down the walkway like they were walking down the aisle, hands intertwined while gravel scrunched under their feet and the black apple trees watched their procession in grim silence. The house lurked above them, the entrance a gaping maw under the scrutinizing eyes of the window panels.

The lock was easy enough to pick, the motion was familiar. Will had done it a thousand times before, albeit under different circumstances. The heavy redwood door swung inwards, revealing a dimly lit entrance hall. Hannibal chucked his umbrella and they stepped inside. 

The floor was designed to mimic the pattern of a chess board, black and white tiles alternating, and Will found himself subconsciously avoiding the cracks between them as they made their way across the room. The vaulted ceiling was dominated by a chandelier the size of a small car. 

In front of them, bifurcated stairs led up to a mezzanine which spanned the back wall of the room. Hannibal ascended the steps first and Will followed him silently. There was more chess board flooring up here, although it was mostly covered by a maroon carpet thick enough to swallow the sounds of their feet. Double-winged doors marked the end of the corridor, redwood again. Hannibal pushed them open.

The lounge room, like the rest of the house, was darkly charming. A sofa and two love seats were arranged atop an oval carpet, a glass table at their center. The marbled walls were covered in paintings, some of them framed in actual ivory. A bust of someone Will probably should have known was mounted on a gigantic bookshelf that was so high, it had a ladder leaned against its’ side.

The fireplace crackled quietly, spreading warm light through the room. An armchair was positioned in front of the fire, and Bedelia throned amongst its’ cushions, nursing a generous glass of red wine.

She turned as she heard them enter, her glossy curls sliding across her shoulder in the process. She had discarded the blazer, revealing a ruffled blouse underneath. Her legs, shiny beneath the sheer tights, were gracefully crossed in front of her.

There was a flicker of fear in her eyes, just for a moment, before she regained control of her features again. She arranged them like one might readjust a slipped mask, letting her usual objective restrain settle back on her face.

 _So much like Hannibal_ , Will thought. _In the end, not enough._

Bedelia straightened her pose, letting her shoulders roll back until she sat like a proud lioness. Throwing them a bitter smile above the brim of her wine glass, she hissed, “I thought you’d never come.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point you have probably noticed that I have neither been to America nor do I have any clue about American geography, I just happily googled away. So, apologies for all the inaccuracies and clichés.
> 
> The chapter title is named after a poem Bonnie Parker wrote while she and Clyde Barrow were on the run together. It’s otherwise known as ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’ and you can read it [here](https://texashideout.tripod.com/poem.html). 
> 
> Kudos and comments are what keeps me going, so don’t be shy :) My tumblr is [dekubitusrex](https://dekubitusrex.tumblr.com/)


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